What Friends Are For
by SkidInSideways
Summary: As a serious illness hits close to home, House reckons with a question he's never had to face before: What do you owe someone who pulled you off the ledge and gave you your life back?
1. Thank God It's Friday

I do not own the rights to the television show House MD. I just like to borrow it once in awhile.

Greg House, MD, PhD, sat in his office in the Diagnostics Department at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, a brand-new soccer ball in his right hand, his left wrist cocked so he could see his watch. It was Friday, minutes before noon. Through the wall dividing his office from the one next door came a powerful New Jerseyite voice:

"SO I GO OVER TO THE SERVICE DESK AND SAY, WHERE'S MY FUCKING CAR? AND THEY SAY IT ISN'T READY YET. I BEEN WAITING HERE FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS AND YOU'RE NOT DONE? I SAY. GODDAMMIT, IT'S A BRAKE JOB, NOT A SHUTTLE LAUNCH!"

At precisely 12:01, House heard a familiar rumble outside his open window--the 12:03 hospital bus was approaching. He shifted the ball to a more comfortable position and waited…waited…waited…

At precisely 12:02:30, the bus screeched to a stop and blasted its airbrakes just beyond his window. At precisely that moment, House let the ball fly, hitting a crude target drawn in blue dry-erase marker on the wall. There was a crash in the other room, immediately followed by a bellowed curse. House caught the rebound and spun the ball on the tip of one finger, smiling with grim satisfaction.

Dr. Alison Cameron, having observed all this from the doorway, now entered. House pointed at the target.

"He's got a framed picture of himself and Dick Cheney hanging at that exact spot," he said softly, "and because he did a half-assed job, nailed it right into the drywall instead of finding a stud, all you have to do is hit the wall just right, and down goes Dick. This is the third time I've knocked it down since yesterday, and he keeps putting it right back up in the same place."

"How will he know he's annoying you if you never tell him?" Cameron asked reasonably. "Why don't you just go talk to him about it?"

House pulled a face. "What's the fun in that?" he said. "He might stop, and I've still got a few more ideas I want to try."

Cameron sighed and dropped the subject. She sat down beside his desk and said, "Have you had a chance to write that recommendation yet?"

"Recommendation. Oh, yeah, I've been meaning to get around to that. Hey, how's the job hunt going? Heard back from Linklater yet?"

"You hacked into my email," Cameron said, without surprise.

"Gotta know who my people are talking to," House said. "Wouldn't want my trade secrets to fall into the hands of my enemies. You don't want to work for Linklater. He's pompous and condescending. And his breath could knock a buzzard off a manure spreader at 50 yards."

Cameron regarded him steadily. "You know, sooner or later you're going to have to let me go work for someone else," she said.

Whoa, shaky ground. Once again, House reflected that having an affair with a subordinate created a minefield in the workplace, even after the affair was over. If he didn't stop throwing up obstacles to new employment opportunities, Cameron might read it as a sign that he regretted breaking it off.

At the same time, he wanted to see her in a job that would make good use of her considerable gifts, with a boss who had the wit to recognize them.

"I want you to go work for someone else," he told her, checking his computer address book and writing down a number. "I want you to call Jay Silberstein at Ohio. Tell him I've put you through two years of hell, and you're afraid you're gonna poison my coffee if you don't get far, far away from me. That should get you an interview." He handed her the number, and she rose to go.

"Cameron—" She turned back to him. House was tendering an envelope in her direction. "Here's your letter of recommendation." She began to open the envelope. "Don't read in front of me."

"Why not?" she asked, reading it. House groaned. Cameron looked up, her eyes filling with tears. "Do you mean all this?" House flapped a hand at her as if she were a seagull at the beach, but nodded. Cameron slowly returned the letter to its envelope. Then she leaned across the desk and kissed his head.

"Get outta here!" he growled, and Cameron left, smiling.

From the next office came the sound of tapping: Dr. Loud was putting his picture back on the wall. House hefted the ball and looked speculatively at the target, but the next bus wouldn't come until 1:03, and he would be in the clinic then. He should be there now.

Pediatrics wasn't really on the way to the clinic, but House wanted to see how Angie Barton had fared during her first chemotherapy treatment. The daughter of an old girlfriend, Angie was a 19-year-old college student who came to the clinic with a sore throat and wound up being treated for acute lymphocytic leukemia. As cancers go it was one of the lesser evils, but House had prevailed upon his friend and sparring partner James Wilson, a respected oncologist, to treat her. At the same time, House tended to be possessive about his patients and anyway, he enjoyed Angie's company, so he made the long detour from his office to the fifth floor and poked his head into her room.

Angie was going to be staying at the hospital for at least three weeks, and she had decorated her room in a style House referred to as Hippie Whorehouse. There were Indian-print bedspreads tacked to the windows and piles of embroidered pillows on the bed, and a garish lamp with a beaded shade instead of the regulation hospital gooseneck on her bed table. House noticed that the Rastafarian hat he'd brought her from his trip to New York City was now adorning the head of the phrenology model that someone—probably Chase—had smuggled up from Lecture Room D. There was a realistic-looking spliff hanging from the model's lips, probably the work of Angie's boyfriend, Nate. But the place of honor was taken by a vast plasma TV, a rental arranged by Angie's dad. The TV was a pleasant addition to the hospital that House and some of his team had begun to regard as one of the perks of their job.

Chase was here now, in fact, hugely enjoying the movie of the moment: _Stuart Little_. "Isn't this kind of advanced for you?" House asked him. "If there's anything you don't understand, there's a probably a five-year-old down the hall who can explain it."

Chase was chuckling. "This is great," he said. "The mouse was driving this little car, and—"

"How're you doing?" House asked Angie. She looked pale but determinedly chipper.

"Not too bad," she told him gamely. "I started to get a headache, so they adjusted the drip, and then it was fine. I ate a humongous lunch."

"That's the prednisone munchies," House reminded her. "You'll probably feel fine today, okay tomorrow, not so hot on Sunday. Remember, Dr. Wilson has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve, so don't tough it out." He watched the movie for a moment and added, "I never figured you for a family fare kinda gal."

"_He_ picked it out," said Angie, pointing at Chase. "He likes one of the actors."

"Michael J. Fox?"

"No, the one who plays the dad. I don't know his name."

"Hugh Laurie," said Chase, not taking his eyes off the screen.

"_The Black Adde_r!" shouted House. "Don't tell me you watch that too!"

Chase looked over at his boss, delighted. "I love _The Black Adder_!"

"What's a block otter?" Angie wanted to know. "He's got Parkinson's Disease," she added.

Chase was confused. "Hugh?"

"Michael J. Fox," said Angie.

"Hugh's on first," House said helpfully.

This did not clarfiy matters for Chase. "What?"

"What's on second," Angie explained, deadpan.

"Michael J. Fox has Parkinson's," said Chase, cautiously.

"I know," said Angie. "He was on _The Daily Show_ awhile back. He was having a really bad day, he said, and he could hardly talk, even though he'd taken his meds. It was really sad. Sometimes his face freezes up, and you can't tell what he's thinking. How can you be an actor if you can't show people how you feel?"

"Hypomimia," said House. "It'd come in handy for poker."

"What?"

"What's on first," smirked Chase. House looked at him reproachfully.

"The child is trying to learn," he said. "Hypomimia means you can't voluntarily make facial movements, Angie."

"Oh. Well, anyway. It must be awful not to be able to do a job you really love anymore."

"Sucks to be him," agreed House. "Where's your mom?"

Angie glanced at him quickly, then looked back at the TV. "She went to the cafeteria to get some lunch. She left about five minutes ago." She added, casually, "You can probably catch up with her if you hurry."

"Thanks," said House, carefully, "but I gotta get downstairs. Clinic duty."

Angie was already reabsorbed in the movie, but Chase gave him a quick look.

"Shouldn't you be falsifying your CV?" House asked him nastily, and left.

He took the elevator to the ground floor, fully intending to go right to the clinic, but decided to stop at the Grab and Go first for something to tide him over until supper. Through the plate glass windows he saw Carolyn Barton sitting at a table on the patio, her face tilted toward the sun, and he decided to drop by just to say hello.

"Shhh," Carolyn told him as he sat down. "I'm soaking up sunlight in my pineal gland."

"Why?" asked House, unwrapping a Snickers bar.

"I don't know. A friend of mine told me to do it. He never said why."

"If your friend told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"

"Well, then I would want to know why," conceded Carolyn, and turned to face him. They had met their first year in college and had three very good years together before they parted under circumstances he preferred not to think about. Then, a quarter-century later, she'd appeared at the clinic, Angie in tow, and they'd been passing the odd hour together ever since. House was a lone wolf by nature, not given to seeking people out unless he had a specific purpose in mind for them, but he had gotten used to being around Carolyn and her daughter—he wasn't sure why. There was something going on there that he wanted to be part of, though whether it was out of friendship or curiousity or nostalgia wasn't yet clear.

Carolyn drained her iced tea and started to gather her things together. "I'd love to chat," she said, "but I have to get back to work."

"You work?"

She paused. "Uh, yeah, I work. How do you think we eat?"

"I thought Scott paid for everything."

"He pays for everything for Angie. But I never took alimony. I've worked ever since the divorce."

"What do you do?"

Carolyn made a dismissive gesture. "Publicity for the university library system. They have a lot of special exhibits; I make sure they get promoted. They publish a newsletter to soften up big donors, and I oversee that. It's a lower-brain function job, but it puts me in the way of a lot of interesting information, and I get to borrow all the books I want."

"So that's what you do with a major in clit lit."

"Behold the fruits of a liberal arts education. I like working for the university. They're being great about Angie's illness; I'm working half time now, and when she comes home to finish her treatments I can take all the full-time leave I need and still have a job to go back to. Without pay, of course; at that point I go on the dole with Scott. But still."

House squinted off into the distance. "Are you coming back here later?"

"Yes, to say good night to Angie."

"Want to grab something to eat?"

"Sounds great. Oh, wow, look at the time. I'll stop by your office? Around six, okay?" She left in a flurry of skirts and tote bags.

Why did I do that? House wondered. Now I'll have to talk during dinner whether I feel like it or not. He thought of calling her around four and pretending to have a case that would keep him busy all night. On the other hand, he thought, I might feel like talking at dinner. He decided to wait and see.

Having exhausted the possibilities for procrastination, House straggled into the clinic. It was after one. The waiting room was dismayingly full, and the crowd included one irate administrator. Cuddy greeted him from across the room, her voice as sharp as vinegar.

"Dr. House. How nice of you to join us."

"Dr. Cuddy. What an unpleasant surprise," said House, picking up a file. "Calvin--Hoobler? Hobbler? Exam Room One."

A young man rose from his chair, one hand engulfed in a grapefruit-sized wad of paper towels, a very pregnant young woman at his side.

"You're an hour late!" hissed Cuddy.

"You're late?" House said loudly. "Well, don't look at me. I wasn't even in town that week!" He led the bewildered couple into the examining room.

Calvin Hoover was a 23-year-old male with a lacerated middle finger, incurred while repairing a broken garage window.

"Looks like the tendons may be severed," said House, studying the wreckage under a bright light. "You should've gone to the ER."

"He should have gone to the ER Tuesday, when it happened," said his wife. "Instead, he went out on his motorcycle! For an hour!"

House regarded the young man sympathetically. Early twenties, not much money, fatherhood less than a month away--who wouldn't crave an hour of escape? Unfortunately, his wife was right.

"This is a nasty cut," he said. "You're probably going to need surgery, or you could lose the finger. And in New Jersey, you need that finger for driving." He cleaned the wound, wrapped it, and sent them off with a referral to an orthopedic surgeon.

After that there was a case of bronchitis, an elderly woman who said she had heart palpitations but really just wanted someone to talk to, and a teenaged girl who asked for the morning-after pill.

"How long since you had unprotected intercourse?" asked House.

"I haven't had it yet," the girl admitted, "but there's a dance tonight, and I might."

"So you wanted to have it on hand, just in case."

She nodded.

"If you think you might have sex tonight, why don't you buy some condoms or sponges, and have protected intercourse?"

"Well...I..." She banged her feet against the examining table in frustration.

"You don't want it to look like you planned ahead, right? It's okay to have sex if it 'just happens'."

The girl stared at him, her expression deliberately vacant.

House sighed and got out his prescription pad. "Here," he said, handing her the script. "But do yourself a favor; stay home tonight and watch _My Super Sweet 16_. You're not ready for prime time." She flounced away without a word.


	2. Let's Go to the Hop

By five o'clock House was back in his office checking his email. There was a message from Krishna Ramakrishna with a link to a _JAMA_ article entitled "Van Gogh Had Meniere's Disease and Not Epilepsy." House grinned appreciatively and responded with three citations rebutting the theory. Fifteen minutes later he got a reply from Krishna with four citations rebutting the rebuttals, and an attachment, which House opened. It was Krish's CV. House scanned it, impressed. Then he deleted it so when Krish formally applied for the fellowship, he would have to send it again.

Cameron came through to pick up her coat and laptop. "I called Dr. Silberstein," she told House. "He said not to bother poisoning your coffee. He said he's already tried that with every toxin known to man, and it only made you stronger. I have an interview with him next week."

"You're going on your own time," House reminded her.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," she smiled. "Have a great weekend."

Wilson dropped by just before six. "Are you okay?" he asked, feigning anxiety. "When they told me you were still here after five on a Friday, I thought I'd better check to make sure you had a pulse."

"Why," complained House, "does anyone take me for anything but the dedicated professional I am? Of course I'm still here. I'm illegally downloading porn MP4s."

"You could do that at home," Wilson pointed out.

"I'd hate to implicate my personal computer in something like that," House demurred. "Oh, look: _Blonde at Both Ends_!" He pretended to click on something.

Wilson sat down so slowly and carefully that it caught House's attention. "Whoa. Tough week?" He was apprehensive; if Wilson needed real friendship perks like a sympathetic ear, it could seriously interfere with his dinner plans.

Wilson made a dismissing gesture. "A long week," he admitted, and smiled wearily. "Want to grab something to eat?"

"Ah." House looked at the clock on his computer: 5:56. And right on cue, here was Carolyn.

"Angie ate like a football player!" she exclaimed. "Is that normal?"

"Let her eat," said Wilson. "She won't feel like doing that much after tomorrow."

"She won't need to. I left her and Nate sharing a bag of popcorn the size of a toddler," said Carolyn. She turned to House. "Ready to go?"

He glanced at the oncologist, who looked back at him, one eyebrow raised. House had one moment to make a decision, and he decided to go big.

"Wilson wants to go along. Is that okay?"

"Ooo! Riding in cars with boys," said Carolyn. "Hope my dad doesn't find out."

They headed out of the building.

"Let's go to Snowshoes," said Wilson. "I'm in the mood for a cherry Coke."

"Well, put on your poodle skirt, Sandy, and let's go," said House. "I want a beer."

"They have beer at Snowshoes," said Wilson. "They also have a good jukebox."

"Who's going to drive?" asked Carolyn.

"Not you," House told Wilson, who hadn't offered.

"Why not?" Carolyn wanted to know.

"Because he drives like a little old lady," said House. "Five miles an hour below the speed limit, one foot constantly tapping the brake. I let him drive us to New York once, and came back with cumulative whiplash."

"Then you drive," said Carolyn.

"I don't have enough gas."

"I'll drive then."

"What're you driving?"

"Angie's Volvo. It's kind of a mess, but we can probably make room for all three of us."

"Forget it," House decided. "We'll take Wilson's car. I'll drive."

"I'll pick the music," said Carolyn.

"The driver picks the music."

"Not when you're burning someone else's gas."

"Do I get any say in this?" Wilson asked politely.

"No," said House. "But if it makes you feel better to pretend to have input, we'll pretend to listen."

They spent the drive to Snowshoes in a pointless argument about speed limits. House maintained that cops should spend their time catching criminals, not law-abiding citizens with good vision and excellent reflexes who happen to be in a hurry. Carolyn pointed out that since speeding is against the law, citizens who speed are, in fact, criminals. Wilson opined that House should upshift sooner and downshift later and please stop for red lights.

"It wasn't red until we were already under it," House pointed out.

"It was yellow when you approached it! Yellow means get ready to stop!"

"That depends on whether it's a fresh yellow or an old yellow," said House.

"What are you talking about?"

"If it just went from green to yellow, it's fair game," said House, demonstrating. "If it's been yellow for awhile, then you should stop."

"You just went through an old yellow!"

"It was around a curve! How was I supposed to know how old it was?"

"Wasn't there a city in South America that decided to save money by not lighting the yellow signals?" asked Carolyn. "Lights went straight from green to red. The body shops must've loved it."

Snowshoes was intended to evoke a 1950s drive-in, with a statue of a giant rabbit in snowshoes on the roof and lots of chrome and red leather inside.

"I feel like I'm in an outtake for American Grafitti,"said Carolyn, taking in the décor. She peered out the window at the adjoining lot. "Ooo! There's even a putt-putt golf game!"

Both men agreed that there could be no question of playing miniature golf, especially on a course with a dinosaur motif called Juraissic Putt.

They placed their dinner orders, and House rose. "Gotta walk the trouser snake," he said, and headed to the restroom.

Wilson watched Carolyn watch House go, saw her smile slip away and a look of sadness take over her eyes. Then she remembered herself and pasted the smile back on as she turned to him.

"How long have you and Greg been friends?"

"Nine years," said Wilson, with mild disbelief.

"Wow. That's some kind of record for him." Carolyn drew a little circle in the water beads condensing on the side of her glass. "Greg isn't usually one for longterm relationships. I was surprised to hear he managed to live with a woman for five years. I guess the whole thing with the leg blew that out of the water."

"It was pretty iffy even before the leg," Wilson confided.

"Was it? I'm not surprised. Greg—please don't tell him I told you this, he hates amateur psychoanalysis, especially when it's about him. But Greg had one of the most dismal childhoods of anyone I've ever known. He'd tell me stories from when he was a kid, and he thought they were funny, but it was all I could do not to cry."

Wilson was startled. "I know his dad was a Marine, and they moved a lot."

"They moved every couple of years. Greg was always walking into a strange school, alone. He didn't even have a brother or sister to help him learn how to get along with other kids, or to take some of his parents' attention off him once in awhile. It was just him and Mom and a dad who was determined to make a Military Man out of a boy who was born with 'Question Authority' tattooed on his butt. Sometimes they were stationed in places where there wasn't even a school for him to go to. No one his age to play with, no one to interrupt his obsessions and say 'let's go ride bikes,' schools full of teachers who didn't know what to do with a kid who was teaching himself calculus in seventh grade. He never really learned how to form attachments, never figured out how to get along with someone over the long haul, never learned how to tell when someone liked him. His default position is offense so he never has to play defense."

"You've given this a lot of thought," Wilson said.

"Yeah, I have," Carolyn admitted. "You've been friends with him for nine years, you know how it is. Our break-up was horrible, a complete car wreck. But a year later, even twenty years later, I'd find myself thinking about Greg, wondering what he'd say about this or that. He can be pure awful, so bad you want to murder him with your bare hands, but then he makes you laugh, and it's not ingratiating—he's so sharp, and funny. It's fun just watching him mull something over. He's not like anyone else." She looked across the room; House was on his way back. "Thank god, right?" She winked conspiratorially.

"This place really does the Fifties theme to death," said House, dropping into his seat. "The urinal cakes are shaped like little 45 records."

"Liar," said Carolyn.

"Go look."

Carolyn shot him a daring look and left the table. House leaned across it and asked Wilson, "What'd she say about me?"

"She said you cry after sex. She found it endearing, but a little bit gay."

Carolyn came back, triumphant. "They're just ordinary urinal cakes! But there's a guy in there with a two-headed dick."

"Now you're lying," House accused. Carolyn held out her hand in a wagering gesture. "Wilson, your turn," said House, nodding toward the restrooms.

"It's such a good story," said Wilson. "Why spoil it with research?"

After dinner, and midway through the third round of beers, both men agreed that it would be a shame to come all this way without playing miniature golf. Fifteen minutes later they were teeing up at the first hole, an easy one located between the front feet of a triceratops that didn't even move its tail.

By the seventh hole House had pulled far ahead, and Carolyn and Wilson were in a dead heat for last place. House hit his ball into the brontosaurus's mouth with just enough force to send it rolling out of its tail onto the next green in one stroke. Wilson and Carolyn each took three.

As they studied the eighth hole, Carolyn said—ostensibly to House, but loud enough for Wilson to hear—"Two guys have been wilderness camping for a week, and as they start hiking home they're getting on each other's nerves. So the one says to the other, 'Look, there are two routes to our next campsite. Why don't we split up; you take one route, I take the other, and we'll meet at dinnertime.'"

House narrowly got his ball past the raptors and headed for the ninth hole, whistling. Wilson managed to squeak through in two. Carolyn followed suit.

"So they did," Carolyn continued, when they were all together on the ninth hole. "That night, they get together at the campsite, and the one guy says to the other, 'You won't believe what happened to me. I was walking along a railroad bed, and I found a naked woman tied to the tracks'."

House knocked a clean shot right past the T. Rex's mouth and tail. Wilson squatted to study the angles.

"'So I untied her, and had sex with her all afternoon in every possible position.'"

Wilson addressed the ball; paused; and squatted again.

"'Wow,' said the other guy. 'So, did you get a blow job?'"

Wilson rose and drew back his putter.

"'Nah,' said the other guy. 'I couldn't find her head'."

The ball hooked wildly, flying over the fence and landing in the midst of a wholesome family group on the fourth hole. Wilson sat down abruptly, helpless with laughter. House added his raunchy cackle. Carolyn stepped neatly over Wilson and, without so much as a flicker of a smile, putted out in one.

-0-

Wilson was still alternately giggling and hiccuping in the back seat as they pulled out of the Snowshoes parking lot.

"Are you trying to lay an egg back there?" House demanded.

"That is the worst joke I've ever heard," Wilson gasped, wiping his eyes.

"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" Carolyn said proudly. "But that's the worst one I know, so you're safe now."

"Don't believe it," House warned him. "She's a little competitive, and she's a genius at blowing your concentration."

"Why are you turning here?" asked Carolyn.

"Because it's quicker," said House.

"No, it's not," she said. "Broadway's quicker."

"Broadway has three signaled intersections," House pointed out. "This way has none."

"You only think it's quicker because you feel better when you get to keep moving," said Carolyn sagaciously. "But Broadway is much shorter, and if you hit the lights right, you can shave five minutes off the trip."

House challenged her to a test drive at some future date.

"No," said Carolyn, "because you'll cheat."

"How can I cheat?"

"I don't know," she said darkly, "but you'll figure something out."

House pulled into the visitors parking lot and drove up and down the rows while Carolyn tried to remember where she had parked.

"Don't you have a panic button on your keychain?" he asked.

"I disabled it," she said.

"For god's sake, why?"

"Because I kept pressing it by accident and scaring myself silly when the horn went off. Oh, look, there it is." She got out and blew them kisses. "Night, boys. Go right home!"

Wilson got into the front passenger seat while they waited to make sure Carolyn's car started. It did, and she beeped, waved, and drove off.

"Sorry I horned in on your date," said Wilson.

"It wasn't a date."

"I sat in the back and listened to the two of you flirt all the way to Snowshoes and all the way back," said Wilson. "It certainly sounded like a date."

House reddened. "Let me ask you something," he said. "Do you ever see a man and a woman together and _not_ think there's something going on?"

"Yes," said Wilson, "but in this case there is."

"She's an old friend!"

"It's not just her," said Wilson. "You're in love with the whole package. You're adopting a family."

House snorted. He pulled into a spot next to his car and got out.

Wilson slid into the driver's seat and rolled down his window. "What are your plans for the weekend?" he asked, insinuatingly.

"I plan to take the bike out and burn up some precious, geopolitically incorrect natural resources," said House. "And then I plan to do laundry."

Wilson grinned. "Have a good one," he said, and he drove away.


	3. Ride 'Em, Cowboy

The Repsol Honda CBR1000RR is a limited edition road bike created to celebrate the successful branding partnership between the Repsol YPF oil company and Honda Racing Corp. The bike reflects its heritage in part by reproducing the racer's color scheme. More importantly, it exploits technical developments from the racing world like an inline 4-cylinder motor that redlines at 12,500 rpm. Perhaps most important to the middle-aged back and seat, the suspension is designed to nullify road surface irregularities, transforming the 172 hp beast into a silky-smooth rocket ship. A used 2005 in mint condition with low mileage can be had for about $10,000. But if you stumble upon an architect with a bad case of road rash and a wife who wants him to get rid of the damned bike before it kills him, and you're willing to wear him down on the price because of the giant scrape on the gas tank, you can do a lot better.

Ever since House bought the bike, he'd been waiting for the right weekend to do the 60-mile loop to Round Valley State Park, an ambition that was repeatedly thwarted by bad weather or patients who stayed inconveniently sick until Monday. This Saturday dawned warm and sunny, and by virtue of getting up before noon and getting out the door before the phone could ring, he managed to get out on the road without delays or interference.

Traffic was heavy, but of a different quality than the weekday commuter type. Drivers didn't take it as personally when he blew past them; no one seemed inclined to smear him on the pavement or against another vehicle as he weaved around the elephantine SUVs and earth-bound minivans that dominante the automotive landscape. There was a certain amount of hot-dogging with a sportscar here or there; other than that, the four-wheelers seemed content to cede him the road, and House made the most of it as he merged onto 31 North and opened it up a little.

People who don't ride bikes don't understand people who do, in part because bikers tend to talk in terms of torque and horsepower and rpm. This leads the uninitiated to conclude that it's all about numbers and power, and the bikers never correct them because (A) they don't care what non-bikers think and (B) there are no words for what they experience when they're screaming down a highway with their facial features rippling in the wind and all that raw power underneath them, fully at their command. The noise, the speed, the wind, and the vibrations wipe the mind clean—for those moments there are no bosses, no cell phones, no way to make plans for the future and no point in worrying about the past, just forward momentum and an endlessly receding horizon.

No suspension system can cushion a bum leg indefinitely, however, and by the time he reached the park and had a hotdog and coke, House was ready to head for home. He started down 206 South, already mentally gathering his dirty clothes from behind the bathroom door and under the bed and trying to remember if he had enough detergent or should buy some on the way back. It was depressing. The day was still sunny and mild, and he was going to spend it in the laundrymat, guarding his jeans against the predators who steal other people's stuff and sold it at the used clothing stores that had sprung up around town.

When he reached the exit for the town where Carolyn lived, House hesitated for less than a second. Then, instead of continuing on to Princeton, he turned off the highway and headed for the farmhouse.

As he drove up Carolyn's road, House saw a woman in a polo shirt and breeches riding a grey horse in the ring at the horse farm. In the same way that geese are said to recognize landmarks from the sky, he perceived that the woman was Carolyn, and pulled into the driveway for a closer look.

The noise from his engine must have startled the horse: It spraddled its legs and threw him a look of alarm. In what House considered a very foolhardy move, Carolyn lifted her legs and delivered a powerful thump to its sides with both heels. The horse shot forward, spun around, and faced House from the other direction, making strange whistling noises through its nose. Carolyn booted it again, and the horse bucked hard. Not only did she stay in the saddle, House could see she was laughing. He tried to remember if Carolyn had ever shown any signs of mental illness.

Another double kick and the horse took off at a brisk trot, head high, still whistling. Carolyn turned it in a wide circle and kept urging it on. The horse began to lower its head. The whistling stopped. Now she had to work to keep it going. At last she allowed it to walk, directing it past the spot where House sat idling.

"Rev the engine!" she called, as they passed.

"What?"

"Rev it!" Carolyn yelled, and made a twisting motion with one hand.

House opened the throttle. The engine roared. The horse jumped sideways and whistled. Carolyn turned it in a circle and yelled "Again!" as they went by. House obliged. This time the horse only tipped its ears in his direction. On the third pass it kept its head down, a look of resignation on its face. Carolyn brought it to the center of the ring and stopped; she cued House for another blast of engine noise, which the beast studiously ignored. She patted its shoulder and dismounted, and led it out of the ring and over to where House was sitting. He turned off the engine.

"Is it hot?" Carolyn asked, pointing to the bike. "I'd like to let him sniff it."

"He'll burn his nose," House assured her, not liking the idea of horse snot on his fenders.

"Maybe later, then," said Carolyn. "He's got to stop spooking at everything that goes by."

"He's a nice-looking horse," House said cautiously. The beast stretched its neck toward him, softly flapping its lips. House drew back, just out of reach. The horse craned forward, and he drew back again until he was almost lying on the back fender.

"He's a nice horse to ride," Carolyn conceded, not seeming to notice that the nice horse was trying to french kiss her old friend, "but he can be a real dickhead sometimes."

Satisfied that House had nothing for him, the horse lunged at the grass around Carolyn's feet. She shoved him away and slapped his shoulder. The horse bared his teeth and snapped at her. Carolyn drew herself up, eyes blazing, and walked straight at the horse's head, shouting "Don't. You. Ever. Do. That. Again!" The horse stood its ground for a nanosecond, then began to back away from her. Carolyn kept coming at him, still barking, "Don't. You. Bite. Ever, ever EVER," until the horse sighed and began making chewing motions with its jaws. Carolyn immediately relented, scratched it behind the ears, and led it, docile and eager to please, back to House.

"Well," he said. "I'm impressed. Can you teach me to do that? It could come in handy when Cuddy tries to enforce my clinic hours."

Carolyn laughed. "Horses are pretty simple creatures," she said. "They really only have two questions: Do you have food for me? and Where am I in the pecking order? As long as you're consistent about saying 'I'm the boss' and backing it up, they'll go along with that."

"And how is that different from office politics?"

"Good point." Carolyn turned toward the barn. "I've got to get him untacked and cooled out," she called. "You want to come along? I'll introduce you to my sweetheart horse."

Lacking a more compelling alternative, House parked the bike and followed her into the barn, standing well off to the side as she removed the saddle and bridle and rubbed the horse's back and chest with a rough towel, then a rubber curry, then a stiff brush. "This is Jack, by the way," she said, grunting a little as she worked the curry. "He's 13. I'm trying to turn him into a dressage horse, and he's resisting with everything he's got." To House's horror, she bent over one of his big, iron-shod feet and worked at it with an evil-looking hook. "I'm wearing him down, but we may both be using walkers by the time he's ready for competition." Carolyn repeated the operation on the other three feet. Jack not only did not seem to mind the hook, he thoughtfully lifted each foot as she reached for it.

Carolyn put a halter on Jack and led him outside. The horse danced alongside her, ears pricked, tail up. "He knows it's treat time," she explained. They halted, and Carolyn fed Jack bits of carrot by holding them at his elbow, hip, foot, and between his front legs, encouraging him to stretch his neck and back muscles. "Horse yoga," she told House. "It's amazing how a little stretching can keep a horse supple. Cherokee is 21 years old and he can still pick a baby carrot off his hip. I've seen horses half his age that can't do that."

They led Jack to a paddock where three other horses stood regarding them with interest. Released, Jack ambled over to a dusty spot, sniffing and pawing. His knees buckled and he sank to the ground.

House was alarmed. "Is he okay?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "He's just got an itch." Jack was on his back now, all four legs in the air, writhing in the dust. "I spend 20 minutes a day cleaning him up," she complained, "and the minute I let him go, he wallows like a pig. I don't know why I bother." Jack rose to his feet and shook himself like a dog. Then he sauntered over to the water trough and drank deeply.

Carolyn sighed with fake exasperation and led the way to an adjoining paddock with three more horses. One of them, a jigsaw puzzle of white and brown patches, started toward the gate at her approach.

"This is Cherokee," Carolyn said fondly, reaching out to scratch his neck. "He's my _good_ horse." She glanced over at Jack to see if he registered this; Jack looked back briefly, water dripping from his muzzle, then continued drinking in a manner that suggested her preferences were of no concern to him. "He knows I'll feed him anyway, because he makes me laugh," Carolyn admitted.

"You'll put up with anything from a male if he has a good sense of humor?" asked House.

Carolyn raised an eyebrow. "Not anything," she corrected. "But a lot. It's a weakness." She haltered Cherokee and brought him out of the paddock. The horse promptly began eating grass as if he were starving instead of shiny and rather fat.

"Cherokee is 21 years old this year," Carolyn repeated proudly. House gathered that this was an accomplishment, and murmured admiringly. He reached out gingerly and patted the nearest flank. Cherokee swished his tail. Something peculiar was starting to happen between his back legs.

"Oh, good, he's dropping," exclaimed Carolyn. "Greg, quick; does his penis look funny to you?"

"How should I know?" House asked, blanching. "I'm not a horse doctor."

"A penis is a penis, Greg."

House stared at the horse's equipment. It looked like a section of fire hose. A very long section. "If you really believe that, you've been out of the dating scene too long."

Carolyn made an exasperated noise. "Why do men fixate on size?"

"It's the poor man's way of keeping score. What am I supposed to be looking at, besides reasons to feel inadequate?

"Sarcomas," Carolyn said, gulping the word a little.

House squinted at the organ in question. "Looks clear to me," he said.

"Wonderful. Now, do me a favor and look at his rectum?"

"Carolyn! Jeeziz!"

"Please."

House sighed and moved to Cherokee's posterior. He lifted the tail and peered underneath it. "Good to go here, too," he said, dropping the tail. Cherokee showed his gratitude by whisking it in his face.

"What a relief," said Carolyn. "You always worry with a white horse, and now that Cherokee is getting older, I worry more."

"You know what to look for?"

"Yes," said Carolyn, "but I'm always afraid I'll miss the early warning signs."

House stood back and admired the old horse. "He looks like a nice old boy," he admitted.

"Do you want to get on him?" Carolyn asked.

"What—ride him?"

"Sure! There's a Western saddle in the barn; it's the owner's husband's, but she lets me use it. Come on, you'll love it." She led Cherokee toward the barn and House, feeling uneasy and intrigued in equal parts, followed.

Inside the barn, Carolyn handed him Cherokee's lead rope and disappeared into the tack room. House stood holding the rope as if it were a live snake, staring at Cherokee, daring him to move. Cherokee gazed back with a look of mild inquiry. Carolyn reappeared, a piece of paper and a pen in hand.

"You need to sign this," she said, and took Cherokee down the aisle to where she had tied Jack.

House read the heading: it was a release form. He scanned the text:

"I acknowledge that horseback riding is a dangerous activity and involves numerous obvious and non-obvious inherent risks that may cause serious injury, and in some cases, death because of the unpredictable nature and irrational behavior of horses regardless of their training and past performance. I acknowledge that a horse may, without warning or any apparent cause, buck, fall, stumble, rear, bite, kick, run, make unpredictable movements, spook, jump obstacles, step on a person's feet, push or shove a person; saddles or bridles may loosen or break—all of which may cause the rider to fall or be jolted, resulting in serious injury or death."

How was this an appropriate activity for an essentially one-legged physician with a sedentary lifestyle?

House looked down the aisle at Carolyn, who was lifting a synthetic cowboy saddle onto Cherokee's back. She looked cheerfully unaware that she was putting one of her oldest, dearest friends in mortal danger. He thought briefly of Jack bucking, spinning, and leaping around the ring. He looked at Cherokee, who appeared to have fallen asleep. What tricks might an old horse play, "without warning or apparent cause?"

House considered quietly walking out of the barn, pushing his bike down the driveway, and riding away. Then he realized he would really rather risk serious injury or death than let Carolyn know he was scared. He signed the release form and, with a deep sense of foreshadowing, dated it.

Carolyn approached with Cherokee, who was wearing the saddle but no bridle. He still had his halter on, and the short lead rope had been replaced by what looked like a very long leash. "Ready?"

"What about reins?" asked House.

"You have to earn reins," said Carolyn. "For now, I'll keep you on the lunge line."

"Lunch line?"

"LUNGE line. This way I can control the horse's speed and direction, and you can concentrate on getting your heels down and going with the motion."

"What do I hold on to?"

"You don't hold on." House looked askance. "Okay, if you really have to, you can grab the horn. But try not to. It's not about holding on, it's about balance."

She handed him a helmet that looked wholely inadequate as protection. Feeling doomed, House put it on and followed her into the ring to a set of plastic steps. Carolyn positioned the horse so its left side was toward the steps and invited House to climb them.

"Okay, put one hand here, on the withers, and the other on the cantle—the back of the saddle. Good. Can you stand on your right leg for a second? Good! Put your left foot in the stirrup and straighten that leg—like that—now swing your right leg over while you move your hand; excellent! Just like getting on a motorcycle!"

Carolyn lied; it was nothing like a motorcycle. For one thing, he was a great deal farther off the ground; his feet dangled in space, and he could feel Cherokee shifting around to balance his weight.

"Okay," said Carolyn, suddenly disciplinarian. "The one thing I want you to remember at all times is, eyes _up_. If you are looking up and ahead, your whole body will fall into alignment and you'll be fine. If you're looking down, your head comes forward, your body follows, and you're in an excellent position to fall off. Look at dirt; eat dirt."

This last was evidently meant to be encouraging.

"Look _up_, Greg. Look _up_. Let him worry about where to put his feet. Loosen your legs a little. Look _up_. Okay, Cherokee, walk."

The horse moved forward. House swayed from side to side in a sickening way with each step. This was supposed to be fun?

"Okay, take a deep breath, let it out, and relax your legs."

"I _am_ relaxed, dammit!"

"No, you're not," Carolyn insisted. "I can see it from here. You're totally buttlocked; you're taking a bite out of the saddle with your cheeks. Now, take a deep breath and exhale. Relaaax."

After several moments in which House did not satisfactorily achieve relaxation, Carolyn halted Cherokee and walked over to them. "The main thing is not to clamp with your legs," she said. "When you do that, your butt muscles tense, pushing you up out of the saddle, which makes you bounce, which hurts the horse so he hollows his back, which makes his stride more choppy, which makes you bounce even more. It's a vicious cycle." She laid her hand on his right thigh. "This leg in particular looks cramped up. Don't try to hold on with it; it shouldn't put anymore pressure on Cherokee's side than my hand is putting on your leg."

House tried to comply, but her hand was lying on the crenulated edge of the scar, and he couldn't stop wondering if she left it there because she couldn't feel it through his jeans, or because she was too polite to snatch it away in disgust.

"And another thing—" Carolyn stepped away from the horse and placed her hands on her hips. "Release your pelvis. The more you can let your hips go with the horse's motion, the deeper and more secure your seat." She demonstrated, undulating her own hips in a manner that no red-blooded man could watch without instinctively thinking of something else. House leered.

Carolyn blushed, but affected a no-nonsense tone. "Yes," she acknowledged, "just like that."

Humor had loosened him up (was that her intention?), and as Cherokee began to walk again, Carolyn pronounced his seat much improved. "Want to try a jog?"

House wasn't sure what that meant. "Why not?"

She clucked to Cherokee, who picked up the pace a little. House felt himself moving smoothly, effortlessly through space, as in the days when he had two good legs and could stretch them to cover ground in great distance-eating strides.

Too soon, Carolyn signalled Cherokee to walk. "That looked good!" she said. "You're a natural, damn you!"

"When do I get to gallop?" asked House.

"Whoa, cowboy! You're going to have to work up to that. But if you want to give it a shot, I'd be happy to teach you. With those long legs of yours, you should be cantering by mid-summer. Then we can go on trail rides." Her eyes shone with the fervor of the hopelessly obsessed. "Trail rides are the best."

House toyed with a bit of Cherokee's mane. "You really think I can learn?" he asked, wanting to hear her say it again.

"You're already learning! Oh, this is going to be _fun_!"

Reluctantly, House dismounted. He insisted on leading Cherokee into the barn himself, leaning against the horse's shoulder for support. He watched closely as Carolyn untacked, asking questions when her explanations grew too arcane, and learned to curry and brush a horse until its coat glowed. They couldn't figure out how to balance him for hoof-picking. "We'll work on it," said Carolyn. House nodded, but he was just as glad not to have to put his face so close to those lethal-looking feet.

The shadows were lengthening as they left the barn, House pushing his bike before him. "Want to come over to the house?" Carolyn said. "I'm just making grilled cheese, but it's really good cheese."

The invitation set off the old alarm. (What does she want from me? What does she expect?) At one time he might have made a lame excuse and fled the scene. Now, House forced himself to appraise the invitation calmly. (She wants to know if you want a sandwich.)

"Yeah," he heard himself say. "A sandwich would be good."


	4. Night and Day

Nevertheless, House was uneasy as they crossed the street and walked up the driveway. Following Carolyn up the back steps, he got to admiring the view ahead of him and lost track of what she was saying. As they washed the horse hair from their hands and arms at the kitchen sink, he ordered himself to ignore the fact that they were standing hip to hip, and that her hands, while visibly older, were still as pretty as he remembered.

He was suddenly very conscious of their isolation. In previous visits, with Angie as a buffer, or outside with the horses, it was possible to believe that they were just old college buddies. Now, alone together, with Cassandra Wilson's _A Little Warm Death_ playing on the stereo and certain memories of their younger years percolating up through his brain, he was finding it harder to keep his mind in the Friend Zone.

Idiot Dog was no help as a distraction. After an initial rousing welcome, she concluded that House was old news and settled onto a rug in the middle of the room, loudly performing an act of personal hygiene.

If the situation troubled Carolyn, she didn't show it. She moved easily from refrigerator to cupboard to breadbox, assembling a salad and sandwiches and talking on and on about horses. There seemed to be more to know about owning and riding a horse than there was to practicing modern medicine, with more areas of specialization and a whole field known as animal behavior. Carolyn had plenty to say on the subject, using individual horses she had known to illustrate.

"Don't you think it's kind of dangerous?" he ventured, after she described a fall from a fractious school horse that had broken her collarbone.

"Of course it's dangerous," Carolyn said impatiently. "But you know what? Every morning I strap myself into a machine that weighs a ton and a half, and go hurtling down the highway at 60 miles in hour with hundreds of other ton-and-a-half machines, many of them driven by people who are drinking coffee or yelling at the kids or making phone calls or doing their make-up, and no one ever says 'Don't you think that's kind of dangerous?' I do it twice a day, five days a week, and I don't even enjoy it! If I get killed on horseback, at least I'll go out doing something I love.

"Anyway," she added, "you should talk, out there on a two-wheeled rice rocket, with all those dimwits in SUVs text messaging their friends and not even seeing you until you're flying over their hood!"

"I drive defensively," said House, defensively.

Carolyn rolled her eyes. "Glad to hear it."

They took their food out onto the porch to eat. The sun was setting, its last rays casting a golden sheen over the farm across the road and the horses in their paddocks. Overhead in the trees, the birds were getting in some last bits of gossip before settling down for the night.

Carolyn propped her feet on the porch rail and sighed. "I love this place," she said. "I love my life. When I think about all the stupid things I thought I needed in my 20s and 30s, all the tears and tantrums over what I couldn't have, I can't believe how lucky I am to reach a time when I can look around and honestly say, 'I want what I have. I have what I want'."

"You don't think about meeting someone? Getting married again?"

"I have met someone," she said casually. "A couple of someones, since the divorce. They were great while they lasted. Then it was great to be on my own again. Never say never, but marriage isn't a priority right now. What about you? How are things with that pretty doctor you're seeing?"

"We broke up."

"I'm sorry," said Carolyn, really meaning it.

"Don't be. It was inevitable." House stared across the road. "We weren't very compatible. Anyway, I'm not programmed for success in relationships." He grimaced, hating the self-pity implied in those last words.

"I wouldn't say that at all," Carolyn said firmly. "What you are, is very reluctant to do anything you think you won't immediately be good at. And you have incredibly high standards for what constitutes 'good'."

"What do you mean?"

"If you didn't get a score or an assist at lacrosse, you acted like your team lost, even if they won. If we bet on something and your guess was closest but not exactly right, you said it didn't count. If you got a B-plus in a course you actually worked hard in, you were miserable for days. You give yourself hell over little mistakes that other people make without thinking twice. You can't keep that kind of score on yourself when you're dealing with people. There's too much room for error to go beating yourself up after every little mistake."

House gave a short laugh. "I've made some big mistakes, too, you know."

Carolyn shrugged. "Who hasn't? Acknowledge the mistake, make amends, move on. But you don't; you brood and pick your mistakes apart and tell yourself what a fool you are. Greg, look at me…"

He turned to her, somber.

"You're not a fool," she said gently. "You're not a failure. Everyone has flaws, and yours aren't fatal. Let yourself off the hook, okay?"

She lay a hand on his thigh and noticed that he tightened up. "Did that hurt?" she asked, withdrawing it.

"No, it—" He forced a laugh. "It's not my best side. Kind of ugly."

Carolyn deliberately traced its outline with her fingertips. "There you go. It's a scar, Greg. That's all." Her tone became meditative. "We're so hung up on perfection in this culture. All of our models are airbrushed and PhotoShopped till they're flawless. No bumps, no wrinkles, no cellulite. Did you know that a show dog or show horse is not supposed to be penalized for 'honorable' scars earned while hunting? They used to mean it. No one would dare put a blemished animal in a show ring today. They all look like they just came out of the wrapper. Most of them have never even seen a hunting field, never been allowed to run and jump and use themselves the way they were meant to be used."

The sun had set; the porch was dark.

"A scar is like a chapter of your story," Carolyn continued. "Maybe it was a painful chapter; maybe you didn't like the way it ended; but you'll drive yourself crazy if you keep trying to go back and rewrite it. All you can do is move on, and write a new chapter."

In the darkness, House reached forward to touch the tip of her collarbone near the hollow of her throat. He traced it toward her shoulder and found the knot where the bone had broken and reset itself. Carolyn gazed at him calmly, her breathing slow and quiet. They kissed.

"Let's go inside," she said.

-0-

Sometime around midnight Carolyn started to laugh.

"No private jokes," said House.

"I'm afraid you'll take it wrong," she giggled.

"Try me."

"The thought crossed my mind: It really does come back to you, just like riding a bicycle."

"You're comparing me to a Tour de France racer, I hope."

"A mountain bike," she smirked. "Good for gettin' dirty with."

House laughed, then asked, seriously, "Is this a good idea?"

Carolyn flopped onto her pillow in mock despair. "Oh, no, _don't_! Don't start analyzing this to death!"

"But what is it?" he persisted.

She pulled the pillow over her head and said something muffled.

"What?" He pulled the pillow away.

"It is what it is," she said.

"Come on, Carolyn, you're not soft in the head. This means something. Are we trying to recapture our youth? Going back to fix a mistake? Just getting our rocks off? What?"

Carolyn propped herself on one elbow and regarded him candidly. "I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe all of the above. Maybe we're just glad to see each other again. To me it feels like a chance to be happy for awhile. Can you let it go at that?"

"I don't know," House said honestly. "I don't have a lot of experience with being happy."

"In my experience, happiness is a lot easier to achieve when you're not always fighting for control of the universe," said Carolyn. "Can you at least try to take life as it comes, in this one little area, just for awhile?"

House thought it over. "I'll give it a shot," he said.

"That's all I ask." Carolyn yawned. She kissed him and turned out the light. A moment later, he could tell by her breathing that she was asleep. House lay listening to her, expecting to be awake for hours. Instead, he fell asleep, too. And if he had any dreams, they were peaceful and easily forgotten.

-0-

House awoke the next morning weirdly conscious of where he was and why. He could feel the press of a warm body against his back, and soft breathing against his neck. He froze, caught somewhere between delight and panic, and tried to adjust his expression to something suitable. Then he rolled over and looked deep into the peeled-grape-colored eyes of Idiot Dog, who was lying with her head on Carolyn's pillow. Idiot Dog promptly sneezed, spraying him full in the face.

Carolyn entered, dressed in Batman pajama bottoms and an old blue sweater and carrying two coffee mugs. "Greta! Get out of there!"

Idiot Dog sprang to her feet, planting a paw in a very tender part of House's anatomy, and launched herself off the bed. Carolyn set the mugs on the bedside table and shooed the dog out of the room, closing the door behind her.

"I'm sorry," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and touching his hand. "She's not supposed to get on the beds, but Angie spoiled her, and she sneaks in wherever she can find a warm body."

He took her hand and kissed the palm. She leaned in for a real kiss. "Good morning," she said shyly.

"Do you feel weird, too?" he asked.

"Weird doesn't begin to describe it." She sat back and took him in. "Here you are; and I turned on the radio in the kitchen and they were playing Bruce Springsteen, _Born to Run_. I feel like I'm in a time warp."

"Both a little older, both a little bolder. Is that coffee for me?"

She handed it to him. "There's plenty more where this came from. But you'll have to get up to get it."

House sat up and ran a mental body scan. "I feel pretty good," he boasted. "Isn't horseback riding supposed to hurt the next day?"

"The day after the next day," Carolyn corrected him. "Tomorrow, you'll curse my memory."

The _New York Times_ was already on the kitchen table when he emerged, fully dressed. House helped himself to more coffee and read the Week in Review section while Carolyn skimmed the magazine. They argued comfortably over whether the U.S. should pull out of Iraq immediately or had a moral obligation to stay until the new government was stable. They placed bets on whether the Secretary of Defense would be cleaning out his office within the month. They debated the merits of stem cell research—breakthrough science or therapeutic dead end? House was inclined to be pessimistic; Carolyn saw it as a miracle in the making.

"You sound like Wilson," he told her, amused.

"Dr. Wilson is a hoot!" she laughed, then asked, too casually, "Does he drink a lot—of coffee, I mean?"

"We all drink a lot of coffee," said House. "As soon as we figure out how to take it IV, we'll do that instead. Why?"

"Nothing. I noticed his hands trembled a little, that's all."

House frowned. "I didn't notice."

"They were shaking when he was holding the menu. He saw me looking and put it on the table to read."

"He might've overdone the Fair Trade Dark Roast. He doesn't drink alcohol to excess, if that's what you're really getting at."

Carolyn sighed. "Am I being an over-protective mother again?"

"Yes," said House. "Although to be fair, people don't worry about that kind of thing nearly as much as they should."

The phone rang, and Carolyn answered it. "Oh, hi, sweetie, how are you feeling today? Oh, no…well, they said you probably would…that bad? Well, honey, I'll be in as soon as I can, but…have you talked to a nurse? Okay, okay…oh, Angie, that'll just make you feel sicker…well, all right, but don't say I didn't warn you…Yes, as soon as I can…I have to take a shower first. In an hour. All right. Talk to a nurse. Will you do that? Okay. Goodbye, sweetie, I love you."

Carolyn hung up and made a face. "She's feeling awful, poor kid. She wants me to bring her Yoo-Hoo." She shuddered. "Strawberry Yoo-Hoo."

"Get it for her," advised House. "One sniff after chemo, and she'll never ask for it again."

Carolyn sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "I'd better get going."

"Should I come, too?"

"Better not. Angie hates to have people around when she's feeling bad. She must be really sick to want me there, but you know how it is; no matter how old you get, sometimes you just want your mommy." She started toward the bathroom, but House stretched out a long arm and intercepted her, drawing her to his side.

"Are you going to tell her about this?" he asked, his heartrate increasing a little.

"What is this?" Carolyn teased, but gently.

"It is what it is," he said. "We're taking it as it comes. Right? But it is something."

"It certainly is," she said, kissing his forehead. "Yes, I will talk to Angie. She'll figure it out soon enough anyway. I've never been able to hide much from her."

Suddenly energized, House stood. "I'm going to head home," he said. "See you later? We could order in Thai food at my place, if you don't mind abject squalor."

"That would be nice," she smiled. "It'll have to be an early evening, though; I'll have to come home and feed the dog, and I've got an 8 o'clock meeting in the morning."

"We can work with that," House said, somewhat inanely, as he put his arms around her. They embraced wordlessly, swaying a little, and kissed. He left, light and cocky, almost swinging his cane as he walked to his bike and got on. The morning was overcast, threatening rain, but the air was still warm and his tires were good on wet pavement. He felt confident he could weather any storm that might come his way.

-0-

As the day wore on, his good mood was interrupted by intermittent stabs of doubt and anxiety. One hit while he listened to his voice mail. There was a message from his mother, sounding mildly reproachful; he'd owed her a call for almost a month. House had put it off at first because he had nothing new to tell her; then because he had too much. It occurred to him that, having urged Carolyn to tell her daughter about them, he ought to let his mother in on the good news, too. But any hint of romance in his life raised her hopes unbearably high—she still hadn't given up on her vision of him happy, healthy, and suitably paired off—and he had an almost superstitious fear of announcing this latest development, as if that by itself could doom it to failure and give his mother another reason to grieve. He never had told her about Cameron.

Besides, telling his mother meant exposing Carolyn to his father again.

Mentally vowing to call his mother as soon as he felt more settled, House showered and gathered his laundry. The day had turned cooler and a heavy rain was falling; that, and bending and reaching for the socks under the bed and the dirty shirts in the back of the closet aggravated his leg, sending him to the prescription bottle for a dose—the first, he realized, since he'd stopped at the state park the previous day. Nothing like lust for releasing endorphins and freeing the body for more a compelling purpose than nursing its aches and pains.

The laundrymat was almost deserted, so he was able to commandeer enough machines to do two loads (darks and dingy) at once. The only other customer was a young mother with two children, a boy of about six and a girl of about eight. They raced around shrieking until a murderous look from House scared them into a corner, where they fell into conversation about their grandmother's farm. Evidently the old lady had gone into the goat breeding business, and the children were speculating about the first batch of offspring.

"I know where babies come from," the boy announced.

"You do not," said the girl.

"Yes, I do," said the boy. "A man and a woman kiss, and then they have a baby."

"What are you two talking about?" called their mother.

"Nothing," the childern chorused. Then the girl said, "Grandma says the girl goats need a boy to have babies."

"Well, _I'm_ not going to kiss a goat!" the boy protested.

House had another attack of doubts when he returned to his apartment. He contracted with a cleaning service, but their notion of cleanliness seemed limited to cursory vacuuming and lightly spraying all-purpose cleaner into the air. For a time there'd been a maid who left the place spotless, but she belonged to Wilson, and he'd taken her with him when he moved into his own place. That was months ago, and things had gone steadily downhill ever since.

He washed the encrusted dishes in the sink, put clean sheets on his bed, and was about to do something with the tottering pile of medical journals on the coffeetable when the black thoughts hit: What's the point of trying? It didn't work out once, why should it work out now? Nothing's changed, nothing's going to change, why open a door just to have it slammed in your face?

He sat down, rubbing his leg, and looked around him. The room was grey and chill, as if no one had lived there for years. This was where he belonged—not in Carolyn's cheerful yellow and green kitchen, certainly not in her pretty blue and white bedroom. He took another pill and sagged in his chair. The phone rang. Listlessly, he answered.

"Hey. It's me." Carolyn sounded shy again. "Angie is feeling better, so I thought I'd pick up something to eat and come over. Are you hungry?"

"What time is it?"

"Five thirty."

How long had he been sitting there? "Yeah, I could eat. You know the Bangkok Palace?" His voice was regaining its earlier energy. "They do a killer pa nang."

Carolyn took the order and promised to hurry. Hanging up, House turned on a couple of lights. The room suddenly seemed a little warmer and less severe. He turned on the heat and shoved the medical journals into the hall closet, alongwith a pair of ancient decaying sneakers and a desiccated peace lily that Cameron hoped would stimulate his nurturing side. He put on some music and got out dishes and silverware. There was a knock on the door, and then there was Carolyn, riding in on a wave of basil and lemongrass aroma, looking bright and pretty and glad to see him. Just for a moment, House gave himself permission to think everything would be all right.


	5. How Was Your Weekend?

As Carolyn predicted, the muscular discomfort associated with horseback riding hit House full bore Monday morning, adding bow-leggedness to his already choppy gait. A pill and a half only took the edge off; stairs were out of the question. Seeing him pitch and yaw toward the elevator bank, Wilson hooted out loud.

"That must've been some ride Saturday," he said, as they stepped into the car. "Where'd you go, Nebraska? I called your place twice that night, and no answer."

"To be truly open to new experiences, one must not allow oneself to be ruled by the clock," House said mysteriously.

"New experiences…" Wilson looked him over through narrowed eyes. "From the way you're walking, I'm almost afraid to guess. Were you shanghai'd onto a whaling ship or did you drop the soap in front of a gorilla?"

House chose not to dignify this with an answer. They exited the elevator and started down the hallway.

"Not talking, eh?" said Wilson. "No matter. My spies inform me that Carolyn Barton was seen at the Bangkok Palace last night ordering pa nang with extra chilies. There's only one joker in this town insensitive enough to eat that stuff, and I'm looking right at him."

House ducked into his office and tried to close the door, but Wilson slipped inside and settled himself into the chair by the desk. House sat down opposite him and tried to look innocent. Wilson was undeceived.

"Spill," he said. But his cellphone rang.

"Wilson. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, let me make a note here—" He gestured to House, who held out a pad of paper, then jerked it back again when Wilson reached for it; held it out again, and had it yanked from his hand; offered a pen, then switched it from hand to hand as Wilson lunged and grabbed for it. Wilson finally snatched the pen away and began to make notes while House tried to read them upside down. After a few moments, he frowned. Wilson finished the call and pocketed his phone.

"What's going on here?" House demanded, pointing at the notes.

"What do you mean? It's a new patient."

"I mean that's not your handwriting."

"Right," said Wilson. "A clever forgery, but nothing escapes your keen eye. If that's not my handwriting, whose is it?"

"I know your handwriting," House said stubbornly. "I'm still finding Post-It notes all over my apartment with your writing on them. When did it get so small?"

"It's a small piece of paper! I was trying to save space!"

House regarded him suspiciously.

"Anyway, we were talking about you. Come on, you might as well tell me; my people are everywhere, and if you're carrying on with the mother of one of my patients, they will report back to me.

"Isn't there any such thing as a right to privacy around here?"

"Two things get around fast in a hospital: staph infections and gossip," Wilson said unsympathetically. "Now, 'fess up; you didn't sleep twixt your own sheets Saturday night."

House glowered at his friend, but the corners of his mouth kept turning up. Wilson was filled with glee. "Oh, what a giveaway! Look at him!" He sang, "House has a girlfriend, House has a girlfriend…"

"Shut up," House suggested, throwing a grey and red ball at Wilson's head.

"Oh, look at that: the shit-eating grin of the freshly-laid man. Did she spend last night at your place?"

House gave up. "She had to go home afterward and feed the dog. But don't wave this around too much, okay? Think of Cameron."

It worked; Wilson sobered up immediately. "Are you going to tell her?"

"We're thinking of renting a billboard. That way everyone finds out at once." He picked up the pad of paper with Wilson's notes, tore off the top sheet, and pretended to read the crabbed notes. Then he offered it to Wilson, who took it. The paper rattled softly in his unsteady hand. The two men exchanged a shrewd look.

"Well," said Wilson. "I'd better let you get down to work, or whatever it is you do all day." He left.

Chase had entered the conference room while Wilson was in House's office and was sitting at the table, reading the comics. In his peripheral vision, House had seen him put something into the little refrigerator. He headed over to the kitchenette, grunting at Chase by way of hello; poured a cup of coffee, and peered into the frig. There was a bag of leftovers from the Bangkok Palace with Chase's name written on it sitting on the top shelf. He had uncloaked Wilson's spy.

"If you're looking for a job, the funny papers are a good place for you to start," he gibed.

"I have a job," said Chase, not looking up.

"That's true," House conceded. "But in two months, I'm gonna stop paying you."

"That's all right," the Aussie said, turning the page. "In two months, Lowenstein is going to start."

Lowenstein was head of the Princeton-Plainsboro ICU. House was flummoxed. "You're going to stay here?"

"Looks that way."

This was such staggering news that House violated his first principle of management: Don't get involved. "But you could go anywhere!"

"I like it here," Chase shrugged.

The idea that someone could claw his way to the top of one level in the career ziggurat and not immediately start clawing toward the next was so foreign to House that he was rendered speechless. Fortunately, it was only temporary.

"You know, that may sound like a sweet deal now, but you could regret it down the road," he advised Chase. "The time to go for broke is now, when you're not tied down by a family and a mortgage."

"I don't want to go for broke," Chase said patiently. "Perhaps you haven't noticed, but I'm not very ambitious. I like Princeton. I like what I do. I want to go on doing it."

House had no answer for this.

Cameron entered and poured herself coffee.

"Did you know he's signed on to another hitch here?" House asked her.

"Yes."

"Did you try to talk him out of it? Tell him what a waste of a good resume that is?"

"I'm still sitting right here," Chase reminded them testily.

"Some people find their professional niche and decide to stay there," Cameron said distantly. "And some people find a cute microbiology professor and decide to stay with her."

Chase blushed. House turned to him, delighted, and opened his mouth to speak.

"It's spring," Cameron added vaguely. "Everyone's hooking up."

House closed his mouth again. So she had heard. You spend months teaching young people to develop their powers of observation, and the first thing they use them on is you.

There was a fraught silence. Chase looked from House to Cameron, got the picture, and rose. "I think I'll get a blueberry muffin," he said loudly, and left.

"I'm trying not to feel like I was traded in," Cameron told the whiteboard, blinking hard, "but it's a losing battle."

"Cameron—don't. We were in trouble long before Carolyn showed up."

"I guess I didn't know that."

"You did know that. We talked about it. And when we broke up—I didn't even know what I wanted from Carolyn then."

"But you do now."

House shrugged. "I've got a better idea."

Still blinking, Cameron tried for a smile. "Wilson says you're good together. He says you seem… happy." House looked down, embarrassed. "I'm jealous," Cameron admitted. "I wanted to be the one who did that for you."

"You're like me; you like a challenge," House said gently. "But don't wait until you're almost 50 to learn which challenges aren't worth taking."

Foreman walked in, took the temperature of the room, and started to walk out again. House stopped him at the door: "Foreman!"

The neurologist turned around slowly.

"Go talk to Wilson," said House.

"Okay," said Foreman, nodding agreeably. He waited a beat. "About what?"

"He'll know."

Foreman left. Through the glass walls, they could see him muttering to himself.

"For the record," said Cameron, "I think this challenge was worth it. And I also think it's definitely time to leave."

House gave her a half-smile. "You'll like Silberstein," he said. "He's like you: hopelessly attracted to hopeless causes, endlessly optimistic about human nature. You can save the world together."

Cameron asked, really curious, "Is he married?"

"No," said House sadly, "he and Ben didn't make it to Massachusetts before they slammed the door on gay marriage. But he's got a brother."

"All right, then," she said, and walked away, swinging her hips a little. She had put on some needed weight, and House noticed that her backside was filling out nicely.

He went up to Pediatrics to see if Angie was watching anything good. She greeted him by making her eyes very big and lisping "Are you going to be my new daddy?"

"How did a nice lady like your mother wind up with such a fresh kid?" House wondered.

"I'm not fresh," Angie said smugly. "I'm precocious." She grew solemn. "I hope you kids are being careful," she intoned. "Condoms provide partial protection, but nothing is 100 percent guaranteed except abstinence. Think about it."

"Angie seems okay with this," House ventured cautiously, when he saw her mother at lunch.

"She's fine with it," Carolyn assured him. "If she wasn't, you'd know. Angie doesn't soft pedal to spare feelings."

"Wilson thinks she might be able to go home soon and finish her treatments as an out patient," he said carefully. "What then?"

Carolyn smiled slyly. "We'll just have to be quieter, I guess."

Bouyed by this answer, House got through the afternoon clinic hours with only one altercation, involving a return patient who complained that the suppositories he'd been prescribed weren't working.

"And they taste terrible," he added.

House was incredulous. "You've been eating them?"

"No," the patient said, with heavy sarcasm. "I've been shoving them up my ass."

House started to write out a prescription for an oral version of the same medicine. "There's a label on every prescription, and the writing on the label is called 'instructions,' and the instructions tell you how to administer the medicine," he explained. "I'm gonna put it in the instructions to put these in your mouth. Don't try to shove them anywhere else." The patient, offended, snatched the prescription and left without another word.

-0-

Foreman sat on a stool at one end of a quiet hallway and watched intently as Wilson walked away from him. Wilson turned around and came back, a question writ large across his face. Foreman stalled him with a few questions of his own.

"Does your right arm feel like it's trembling inside, even when you're not exerting it? How does that shoulder feel? Any numbness, tingling in your neck, arms, legs?" Wilson answered quietly, his eyes fixed on a spot beyond Foreman's left ear.

Foreman drew a deep breath, exhaled; looked away, then looked back.

"Wow," said Wilson. "That's the worst poker face I ever saw."

Foreman regarded him somberly. "We can go about this two ways," he said. "We can run a hundred tests and rule out everything else, which'll take weeks, or we can do an L-dopa probe and know in a couple of days."

Wilson didn't seem to hear him. "I've got to think this over," he said. Foreman nodded. "In the meantime, don't say anything to House, okay?"

Foreman looked doubtful. "He told me to talk to you. You think he won't follow up?"

Wilson sighed. "Well, do the best you can."

-0-

"I was thinking of stopping on the way home and picking up something to put on the grill," said Carolyn, when House called her at around five. "Would you care to join me?"

"Do I get to play with fire?"

"Only under adult supervision."

"Fair enough. Can I bring anything?"

"Beer, if you want it." A pause. "And a toothbrush, if you like."

House made a quick stop at the convenience store for beer, then at his apartment for clean clothes and his shaving kit. He was halfway to Carolyn's house when he realized he'd forgotten to check with Foreman about Wilson. He decided it could wait till the next day, and by the time he got to the farmhouse, he'd forgotten all about it.


	6. Down on the Farm

The weeks that followed almost made House a believer in Carolyn's live-in-the-Now philosophy. He spent his days at PPTH, where the caseload was light but interesting, and his nights at the farmhouse, where he had already acquired a favorite chair and even made his peace with Idiot Dog, whom he tried to remember to call Greta. Carolyn, always an easygoing companion, had become even more so over the years. If he was late getting there in the evening, she put his dinner in a microwaveable dish and went to the barn to fuss over her horses; when the phone rang in the middle of the night, she bid him a safe trip and went back to sleep.

She handled his occasional bad moods the same way she dealt with them in college; by declining to take them seriously.

"Let me ask you something," House demanded on a morning when he didn't feel like going to work and needed to pick a fight, "do you own any clothing that doesn't come from LL Bean or the Dover catalog?"

Carolyn paused and thought it over. "My underwear is from KMart," she said, and went back to buttoning her dress.

"Let's talk about your underwear," House persisted. "These granny pants you wear—"

"They're high-cuts!"

"Why don't you wear something more inspirational—like a thong?"

"_You_ wear a thong," said Carolyn. "I want my clothes to cover my ass, not merge with it."

When he returned to the farmhouse that evening, Carolyn produced a shopping bag from one of the better department stores and rattled the contents at him enticingly. Humming an old bump-and-grind number, she dipped into the bag and revealed, first one strap, then another, and finally the entirety of a hot-pink thong with black lace trim.

"This one's for me," she said seductively, holding it at waist level and vamping.

"And this one is for you." She produced a blue and white man's thong, and tossed it to him.

House held it by the tips of two fingers and threw her an outraged look. Carolyn stood firm.

"Terms of the deal," she grinned. "I'll wear one if you wear one."

Later, as they got ready for bed, House stripped down to his boxers and paused dramatically, waiting for her full attention. When he got it, he dropped the boxers and stood before her in his new undergarment.

Carolyn shrieked and collapsed onto the bed laughing.

"Not the reaction I was going for," House said with injured dignity, "but now it's your turn. A deal's a deal."

She pulled herself together and fetched her thong from the dresser. Turning her back on him, she reached under her beige linen shirtdress and tugged and wriggled; a moment later a pair of white nylon panties fell to the floor around her ankles. She stepped away from them, turned, and put the thong on her head.

House shouted in protest.

"You didn't say how I had to wear it," she gloated.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her onto the bed. They wrestled briefly, laughing, until Carolyn suddenly gasped. "Ow! My arm!"

House sat up, horrified.

"Fake out!" Carolyn chortled, and snapped his waistband. Baring his teeth, House tickled her until she gasped out a transparently insincere apology. The wrestling match grew less competitive and turned into something else entirely.

Later, Carolyn began to sing, "The thong is over..."

"Stop," House said sternly. "You will not ruin the Who for me."

She giggled. "How about _The Thong Remains the Thame_? _Annie's Thong_? _Life'th a Long Thong_?" She sang, "Thing, thing a thong--"

"Thut up."

"I love being in bed with you," she told him drowzily. "I always end up laughing."

"That's just what a man wants to hear," he remarked.

"You know what I mean." She was fading fast.

"I love...being in bed with you, too," he said huskily, but Carolyn seemed to be asleep.

On nice evenings they sat on the porch, talking or just listening to the birds.

"You know what's happening, don't you?" House asked one night. "We're turning into old farts. In 30 years we'll still be settin' here, gumming our supper and waving to passing cars." He slumped in his chair, hitched his waistband higher, and turned a toothless, vacant smile toward the road.

"People who do that kind of thing look pretty happy," said Carolyn.

"It's the complacency that bothers me," said House. "Is this where all the pain and anguish and struggles of a lifetime are supposed to lead us? Elderly pensioners, spending our remaining days tending our own little garden?"

"Not if you don't want to," said Carolyn. "You could join the Peace Corps, or build houses for Habitat for Humanity, or teach. But let's give this porch thing a fair trial first. Oh, look; here comes a car. We can practice." She waved.

There were bad moments. He could not completely ignore the cold, rational voice in his head that seized on the negative details in an otherwise pleasant scene. He and Carolyn were out in the yard arguing happily over the merits of grass versus lawn cover when they heard the scree of a red-tailed hawk and looked up to see the bird floating above them, rising and falling on a thermal updraft.

"Look how happy he is," said Carolyn, shading her eyes.

Sentimental, sneered the voice. Anthropomorphizing. Probably thinks the world would be a better place if we could just live in harmony with nature, like the animals. Conveniently overlooks the part where the hawk catches the bunny rabbit and starts tearing the flesh from its still-living breast.

"Dad has a big collection of bird feeders," Carolyn added, with relish, "and he says the hawks around his place use them like the drive-through windows at McDonald's. He'll be watching a group of birds feeding, and all of a sudden, BAM—a hawk shoots through and nails one, feathers everywhere. So much for the peaceful kingdom!"

Even when he managed to still the critical voice, the analytical voice clamored on. What was the nature of his relationship with Carolyn? What drew him to the farmhouse night after night? It wasn't just sex; after the initial frenzy, there were times when they simply went to sleep, even times when Carolyn turned in early and he stayed up reading or watching TV, often with Greta draped over him like a dogskin rug. When he did turn in on those nights, he would stand for a moment watching Carolyn sleep and wonder why it didn't feel strange to be getting into bed with her. When they made love, the experience was at once tantalizingly new and comfortingly familiar—a homecoming, as best he understood the word, never having felt at home anywhere in his life.

"God, you are so in love," Wilson smirked, after House hung up from a pedestrian conversation with Carolyn about a plumbing problem in her upstairs bathroom. He longed to pursue the topic—Why do you think that? I wasn't talking in a funny voice or calling her pet names, so what tipped you off? Can you quantify it?—but that would be lending credibility to Wilson's opinion, and House wasn't ready to do that. The word seemed at once too banal and too loaded for what was happening. Banal, because what he felt when he was with Carolyn was such a variety of emotions, with so many shadings, that one word seemed inadequate; loaded, because in his experience, love led to pain as surely as heavy drinking led to hangovers, and he was sick of pain in all of its forms, tired of planning his life around avoiding it, weary of procuring, hoarding, and swallowing pills in an effort to stay one step ahead of it.

Carolyn agreed with Cameron that his problems with Dr. Loud were best addressed by respectfully negotiating a mutually satisfactory resolution.

"Win-win?" snarked House.

"Of course."

"What if he won't parley?"

"Well," she said judiciously, "in that case you'll have no other recourse than to sign him up for every piece of spam in the universe."

House put Carolyn's strategy into action after a particularly bad morning in which Dr. Loud shared the results of his colonoscopy with everyone on his speed dial. At the first lull, he hurried to his neighbor's door and knocked.

Dr. Loud proved to be of middling height and solid build, blond and crew-cut, with light blue eyes that appeared to be popping out of his head and a bluff, hearty manner that contrasted weirdly with his telephone persona. House labeled him as trouble: a blow-hard bully boy of the type that prowls every schoolyard; mysteriously popular, able to rally mobs of slow thinkers against anyone who crossed him, an inventor of nicknames that stuck and hurt.

"I'm Greg House," he said, offering his hand. "Dr. House. Next office over."

"Oh, yeah, yeah! I been meaning to come over and say hi. Howya doin, I'm Dick Loudon, proctologist."

House looked around the office for a moment while he digested that information. The picture of Dr. Loudon and the vice president was no longer hanging on the wall; it was propped up on a bookshelf, and House went to take a closer look. The crash landings hadn't done the piece any favors. The frame was chipped and the glass was cracked.

He turned to peer closely at Dr. Loudon, whom he had mentally re-christened Dr. Dick. The proctologist looked back at him inquiringly.

"Sorry," said House. "I couldn't help looking to see if you've been peppered." He nodded toward the picture.

"Naw, never been invited on a hunt," said Dr. Dick. "That was from a grip-and-grin for volunteers who helped put him and the president over the top in Ohio. My wife tried to get him to sign it, 'From One Dick to Another,' but he wouldn't do it for some reason. Anyway, what's on your mind?"

House gently bounced his cane, trying to compose himself. "I don't know if you've noticed, but the walls here are kind of thin—"

"Noticed! See that crack? That fucking picture came down three times in two days, just because the fucking bus stops outside my window! This whole hospital is made of crap! Crap materials, crap construction! Well, shit, Jersey is the land of the Mob, right? They only use real concrete when they're making shoes."

House cleared his throat. "Anyway, I don't think you realize I can hear every word you say when you're on the phone, and I came over to see if you could tone it down a little."

"I gotta tell ya, that's not gonna happen," said Dr. Dick. "I got a lot of calls to make, and I like to make sure the other guy can hear me. If I was you, I'd get some earplugs."

House nodded—"Just checking"—and withdrew. In the hallway, his face lit up with bad intent. Ethically, he felt, he was cleared for action.

-0-

By the next afternoon, Dr. Dick's phone calls centered around the waves of triple-X rated spam flooding his email In box. He would indignantly read the subject heads out loud to his conversational partners, which everyone found very amusing, at least for the first hour or so.

-0-

Cameron went to Ohio and came back a member of the Jay Silberstein Fan Club. Chase spent more and more time with Syd Lowenstein, discussing procedural streamlining. Foreman seemed more preoccupied than usual, glancing at House once in awhile as if expecting him to say something.

-0-

The riding lessons continued, and House was cleared to canter. He did fine going from a walk to a jog, or a jog to a lope, but deceleration was a problem; he kept getting thrown forward, and almost went off over Cherokee's shoulder once or twice.

"You collapse in the middle," Carolyn said, in the impersonal, clinical tone she used in the riding ring. "You need to build up your core strength—your abs and back muscles. The best thing for that is crunches." House made a face. "Okay, push-ups, then. Pull-ups. Tricep dips. You have the equipment at the hospital, right?"

House fiddled with Cherokee's mane. "What about leg work?"

"It wouldn't hurt. Just standing backwards on the edge of a step and letting your heels drop will lengthen those tendons and help you get your heels down. But the main thing is to strengthen your core; it'll help stabilize you overall, and that'll help with your balance."

The exercise equipment was in the physical therapy department at the hospital. Using it meant risking exposure to Physical Therapists, or, in House's private parlance, the Pain and Torture crowd. But he began to sneak down there during the slow hours, and was gratified to find that with a little modification, he could do most of the upper-body and abdominal work. Progress in one area made him hungry for success in another, and he began to put in a little time on a slow treadmill every now and then. He felt that things were definitely looking up.


	7. Did You Do Something to Your Hair?

Angie began to lose her beautiful dark brown hair after the second chemo treatment. There was a pile of it on the pillow when she woke up the next morning, and the rest seemed to pour off her head, getting into her mouth and eyes and covering the bed. She wasn't very brave about it; when Carolyn arrived in response to her panicky early-morning phonecall, Angie wailed and sobbed so hard that House made Wilson order Valium for her.

The next day, when she was able to think calmly, Angie agreed that she might as well shave off what was left and get it over with. She was stoic as her mother ran the clippers over her head, feeling the smooth skin with nervous fingertips, and spent the morning trying on a basketful of exotic hats and scarves. Nate came by that afternoon and demanded that Carolyn shave his head, too. They split a pair of hoop earrings and called themselves Mr. and Ms. Clean, and made plans to get matching tattoos on their scalps. By the next day, Angie had righted herself and sailed on.

Like most chemo patients, however, she had come to dread her treatments. She was also heartily sick of the hospital and longing for her horses. Carolyn wished there were some way to bring Cherokee to see her. House thought this over for a day and got an idea. That night, Cherokee had a thorough bath. The next day he climbed into the horse trailer and Carolyn and House drove him to PPTH.

They unloaded him in the parking lot near the loading docks. Carolyn kept looking around nervously.

"Relax," House advised her. "It's a Saturday; hardly anyone's around, and Cuddy's probably at temple flashing the cantor. We'll go in, surprise Angie, and leave. No one will be the wiser."

"Maybe," she said grimly. "But bring these just in case." She handed him a bucket and a plastic pitchfork.

"For Cherokee, or for you?" he asked, and got a flick of the lead rope across his flank in response.

They lured the horse up the steps with a combination of carrots and cajolery. To Carolyn's astonishment and House's secret relief, Cherokee walked right onto the freight elevator and stood quietly for the trip to the fifth floor.

House left Carolyn holding Cherokee in the cement-floored service area and went to reconnoiter. He beat a hasty retreat a few minutes later, quickly closing the door behind him. "The place is crawling with nurses and parents," he hissed.

Carolyn said a bad word.

"No, wait, I think I can sneak her in." He left again, this time returning with Angie, who squealed loudly and inopportunely when she saw her horse.

"Cherry, oh, Cherry, oh, baby!" she caroled, and flung her arms around the gelding's neck. "Ooo, you smell good! Did you have a bath? Didja? Were you a good boy? Mom, gimme a carrot!"

Angie's cries carried into the ward. Moments later they heard children's voices, and before House could move to block the door, a small army of youngsters in various stages of recuperation had flooded the service area and converged on Cherokee. Angie was in heaven, answering questions, putting Cherokee through a series of tricks, even setting some of the children on the horse's broad back. But the party had scarcely begun when the authorities moved to break it up: House looked up from the happy scene to see a phalanx of nurses standing in the doorway, looking grim.

He put on his warmest smile and moved toward them.

"Hello!" he sang, extending a welcoming hand. "I'm Dr. House. I heard someone up here was a little horse."

-0-

"Unspeakable carelessness…utter lack of responsibility," Cuddy sputtered, when she met with House and Carolyn Monday morning. "Some of those children could have been allergic to horses—did you think of that?"

"Yes," said House, "which is why I checked to make sure none of them were, and Carolyn washed the horse with hypoallergenic shampoo."

"Forget the shampoo! What about the danger? You brought a full-grown horse into a hospital ward full of noisy children! What were you thinking?"

"That we would sneak in, show him to Angie, and sneak out again," said House. "We weren't expecting a midget rally."

"And you!" Cuddy turned on Carolyn. "I thought you would be a good influence on him! You're as bad as he is!"

"She's nowhere near as bad as I am," House said indignantly.

"It was my stupid idea," Carolyn reminded him.

"It was my stupid plan!"

"You're both at fault here, and you'd both be liable if anything had happened!"

"But it didn't," House pointed out. "So now what: Are you going to give us detention? Ground us? Take away the keys to the car?"

Carolyn leaned forward and placed an apologetic hand on Cuddy's desk. "I am sorry," she said. "It was a silly thing to do. I just wanted to see Angie smile again. She's going home in a few days anyway, it'll never happen again."

"Unless you want us to fix you up with Cherokee," House added generously. "I've seen his junk, you might—" An elbow to his solar plexus cut off his wind before he could complete the thought.

Carolyn smiled into Cuddy's eyes, waiting for her response.

"Obviously, there's nothing for me to do but put another written warning into Dr. House's file and ask you to refrain from bringing any more pets to the hospital," said Cuddy. "And please try not to encourage him to pull stunts like this—the last thing he needs is a partner in crime."

"Nag, nag, nag," said House.

-0-

The first thing Angie wanted to do when she got home the next week was to watch House demonstrate his horsemanship. She was impressed with his progress and petitioned her mother to let him graduate to trail rides. Then he took her for a ride on his bike, the tails of her scarf flying like pennants from under the helmet he'd acquired for Carolyn.

They had Wilson over for a celebratory dinner, and since Foreman was at loose ends when Wilson was leaving the hospital, he brought him along. Seeing them together, House recalled with a pang of guilt that he still hadn't checked up on Wilson's hand tremors. He put it out of his mind—this was Angie's party.

House took Wilson to see the horses.

"You really ride that thing?" Wilson asked, pointing to Cherokee.

"I really ride him."

"What if you fall off?"

"It'll hurt," said House. This had been Carolyn's matter-of-fact reply when he'd asked her the same question, only she'd added, "And anyway, you're much more likely to break a wrist or a collarbone than to hurt your leg."

Wilson leaned against the fence and regarded him with amusement. "So this is what you look like when you've been domesticated," he said.

House was irked. "I'm not completely housebroken. I put the seat down, but I never replace the empty toiletpaper rolls."

For some reason the dinner conversation turned to guns, and Carolyn revealed that she possessed a .22 rifle, a gift from her father. This led the party to the backyard, where Carolyn had put up a wooden target stand. The men shunned her paper targets as effete and unnecessary when beer cans were readily available. They took turns riddling the cans until it was too dark to see. And Foreman, who insisted he had never shot a gun before, was declared the champion.

"He was a break-and-enter specialist," House explained to Angie, who looked uncomfortable. "Typical passive-aggressive; he avoids confrontations. Wouldn't want to run into someone who might have a bigger barrel." Foreman smiled thinly.

He wasn't smiling at all the next day when he pulled House aside in his office. "You never asked about Dr. Wilson," he accused.

House feigned unconcern. "I figured if there was something I should know, you'd tell me."

"I would have, but he asked me not to."

"You're mad me because I didn't ask you for information you can't give me?"

"I'm irritated because you don't seem to give a rat's ass! You've been so busy being the family guy, you let the whole thing drop for three weeks!"

House said nothing for a moment, but bounced his cane vigorously.

"What do you think is wrong with him?" he asked finally.

Foreman snorted. "What do you think?"

"It's hard to get a definitive diagnosis for Parkinson. A lot of things could cause the trembling."

"And the resting tremor? And the incipient bradykinesia, and the lack of motion in his left arm when he walks?"

"Get Cameron and Chase in here. We'll run through some other possibilities."

"They've gone home already."

"Call them back!"

"House. We did an L-dopa probe. His symptoms got better."

"Can't have been on it that long. A lot of things get better temporarily with L-dopa."

"Look. If you want to do a differential diagnosis, fine. But it can wait until morning."

House moved to pull rank, and ran smack into the brick wall of Foreman's obstinance. "Fine," he muttered, and Foreman left.

Left alone, House popped a pill and sat waiting for it to take the edge off the nervous energy he had suddenly acquired. Half an hour later, he was still too keyed up to think clearly.

It's widely assumed that illness is less terrifying to healthcare professionals because they understand its nature and know what to expect. For most, however, knowing what to expect is a mixed blessing at best. When House considered today's diagnosis of Parkinson Disease, the words "chronic" and "progressive" were ineluctably attached, causing his mind to effortlessly fast-forward ten years into the future. He saw Wilson's agile brain locked inside an increasingly unresponsive body; he saw him struggling to speak, unable to write, his bright brown eyes growing duller by the year as his gifts slipped away.

His agitation increased when he looked across their balconies and saw Wilson alone in his office, lying back in his chair with his eyes closed. House awkwardly vaulted over the wall and entered without knocking. Wilson didn't even open his eyes.

"I talked to Foreman," House said accusingly. Wilson nodded. "You're just going to take his opinion lying down?"

"He had me take levodopa. It helped. He found that pretty definitive."

"Foreman's a quack!"

"He's the best fellow you've ever had."

"Oh, now, there's a ringing endorsement! You need to see a specialist."

"I saw Parker."

"When were you in Philadelphia?"

"Last week."

A stab of guilt—House hadn't even noticed he was gone. What else had slipped past him lately?

"You spend years talking to patients on the worst day of their lives," Wilson remarked, gazing at the top of his bookshelf, "and you think you empathize, but you don't really believe a word you're saying will ever apply to you. And then one day you're the one in the patient's chair, and someone is giving you the same load of psychologically correct crap you've been handing out for years, and you realize you didn't know a damned thing."

He turned, his eyes wide and bewildered. "I'm the caretaker," he said. "How can it be that I might wake up someday and not be able to take care of myself?"

"You're giving up too quickly," House said forcefully. "You can't go by anyone's half-assed diagnosis this early in the game. There are plenty of things we can look at, starting tomorrow. Will you let us try?"

Wilson smiled faintly. "Do I have a choice?"

"No. Be here by nine."

"You're going to be here at nine," Wilson commented. "Maybe miracles do happen, after all."

-0-

House timed his arrival at the farmhouse for after dinner, and ate by himself in the kitchen; Carolyn, after a quick glance at his face, went into the den to work on her computer. Finished, he prowled through the living room looking for a place to be alone. Angie and Nate had taken up his usual spot on the couch and were critiquing an ad for a new horror movie.

"We're trying to think of all the sub-genres to horror movies," Angie told House. "There's the inanimate-object-comes-to-life genre, the scary-little-kid genre, the disfigured-maniac genre, and the ghost-on-a-rampage genre. What else?"

House gave a nervous shrug and passed on to the front porch. A moment later Carolyn walked through the living room and he heard Angie demand, in a loud whisper, "What's wrong with _him_?"

"I guess he had a bad day," Carolyn said mildly. "Just leave him alone, and when he's ready to play again, he will."

But later that night, when Carolyn worried once again about Angie's lack of appetite after chemo and House said irritably, "Angie could stand to lose a few pounds," she was less understanding.

"I'm sorry. That was out of line," he muttered, really meaning it.

"That wasn't just out of line; that was mean," Carolyn said angrily. "Are you going to tell me what's really wrong, or am I supposed to guess?"

House shook his head miserably. "Patient confidentiality."

"But the patient is in bad shape?"

"Not yet. Will be."

Her expression softened. "Everyone has a bad day once in awhile," she said, stroking his cheek. "But try not to inflict it on others, okay?"

He nodded, but lay awake long after Carolyn had gone to sleep.


	8. Let's Make a Deal

In a Hallmark world, where politicians are judged on their ability to emote on camera and there's a bumpersticker for every sentiment, the person who doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve is automatically suspect. Failure to smile, weep, or hug according to universally recognized cues is widely considered a character flaw. People like House rarely challenge this view because they prefer not to disclose the truth: it's not that they can't feel strong emotions, it's that they would rather not.

It's a commonplace to attribute emotional repression to cultural norms as they applied to raising boys born before the 1970s. In fact, the world is full of middle-aged and elderly men who laugh and cry with equal abandon. But those who don't are often so hamstrung by their own self-control that they are the invisible walking wounded. The only thing more damaging than the internal turbulence this causes is the fear of ever letting it escape, especially after four or five decades of fermentation.

House encouraged his colleagues to think he avoided patients and their messy situations because he didn't give a damn because he'd rather be thought of as heartless than fearful. It was essential that no one guess that at the heart of his elusiveness was a horror of sympathizing. Sympathy could lead to empathy, empathy could lead to grief, and grief was unacceptable; it clouded the mind, sucked up energy, slowed responses. Above all, grief was an admission of failure; it meant you have accepted the intolerable.

Confronting Wilson's diagnosis brought everything to the surface for him. Not only did he sympathize with his friend over the battle ahead, he understood exactly how it felt to look into a future in which he could not practice medicine--and exactly how insupportable that thought was to someone whose entire existence had revolved around being a doctor since childhood, whose identity and self worth were inextricably bound to his profession. It revived memories and feelings he had struggled to bury for six years. It meant revisiting the months after the infarction, which was like returning to the dark alley where you were mugged and left for dead in a gutter.

-0-

He rose slowly through unconsciousness, a dark fog that at first only admitted the sounds of the ICU monitors and soft voices. The fog lifted, and he made out the blurred outline of Stacy's face as she bent over him. He smiled weakly. Her voice came muffled through the thrumming in his ears: "How do you feel?"

It took a minute to think that over. How did he feel? The fog lifted a little more, and he felt—pain. His leg hurt like hell. His heart sank, and the smile left his face. It hadn't worked after all.

"Still hurts," he whispered.

"You've had surgery," Stacy whispered back. That didn't sound right, so he chose to disregard it. "I'll get the nurse," she said. Yes. Moments later there was a pastel blur at his bedside; a syringe; blessed relief as the fog swallowed him up again.

The agony returned along with full consciousness the next day.

"What have you done to me?" he bellowed, as Cuddy blanched and Stacy wept. "Why didn't you do what I told you to do? You've crippled me, goddamn you!" He lunged at them, roaring, unmindful of the searing pain in his leg. A pair of husky male nurses appeared; restraints; another syringe; more fog.

Months later, still unable to walk any distance but somehow capable of acquiring alcohol and pills, he slumped in a chair glaring at Stacy and reciting a now-familiar litany: "You cut off my balls. Why didn't you just kill me then and there? Why do you hang around here now? I'm finished. Why don't you go find someone else to fuck over?" This time, instead of weeping, Stacy remained eerily calm. "This is bad for both of us. I'm leaving."

A week after that he was in the same chair, feeling numbness claim him as his vision dimmed. There was a distant thumping noise, accompanied by a different voice: "House? I know you're in there. _House_. Answer the door!"

But the voice was faint and easily ignored. His head lolling, he looked at the prescription bottle in his hand and noted with dull interest that it was nearly empty. He'd started out with one pill for the pain in his mutilated leg, liked how it also soothed the turmoil in his head, and took another. The third pill made him feel as if he were standing on the deck of a ship that was pulling away from the dock and all the thoughts and feelings he wanted to leave behind. He took a fourth pill to keep the ship sailing forward. How many had he taken since then, washed down by how much scotch? Did it matter?

There were new sounds now; two voices, a key turning in a lock. He tilted his head and saw a shadowy figure coming toward him. His eyelid was pried open; the bottle taken from his hand; the voice, addressed to some third party: "Thanks, I'll take it from here. No, I can deal with him, I'm a doctor. Thanks."

The shadow disappeared. He heard pots and pans clattering in the kitchen. A new bottle was forced on him: syrup of ipecac. A wave of nausea snapped him up and over, made him lean his elbows on his knees, and he vomited into a lobster pot until tears streamed from his eyes. The wave had barely subsided when the bottle was forced on him again. Through the retching and gagging, he heard the voice—now identifiable as Wilson's—murmuring "I know it's bad, I don't blame you, but it's fixable, you'll get through it, it's not worth dying over."

There's been a mistake, House thought. This isn't suicide, just a vacation cruise. He struggled to find the right words: "I don't want to die."

"I'm not going to let you," said Wilson, and House realized he'd been misunderstood. "No," he began, but succumbed to another wave of sickness before he could explain.

"Yes," said Wilson firmly. "You're going to live, and we're going to figure out a way to make it worthwhile."

Wilson stayed all day. He called home once to tell his wife they were having such a good time, he wanted to stay for dinner, then called her again to say he'd had too much fun and needed to sleep it off on House's couch. He probably didn't sleep at all, and it was House who stretched out on the sofa, obediently drinking whatever Wilson could find to rehydrate him with and dozing the rest of the time. The next morning he joined Wilson at the kitchen table and listened apathetically to a well-thought-out plan for putting his life back in order. That afternoon they met with Cuddy about putting him on staff. Cuddy, bless her soft heart and softer head, mistook House's listlessness as the sign of a sadder and wiser man, and agreed.

The months that followed were far from transformative. House continued to drink too much, pill too much, and talk too little; more than once, Wilson had to drive him home from some rundown bar or cover for him when he overimbibed at work. The rewards for this loyalty were few and far between; more often than not, Wilson found himself on the receiving end of a torrent of drunken abuse. But he never waivered in his support, never gave up on House, even when House tried to give up on himself.

-0-

Now Wilson was facing the worst crisis of his life, and House had paid him back by hooking up with a woman and becoming so enthralled with his newfound happiness that he ignored the disaster taking place right under his nose.

His feeling of guilt was amply supplemented with fear, and the memory of fear. Disability wasn't a "challenge," as the cheerleading pamphlets and counselors insisted; it was a daily reminder of the way anyone's world could be turned upside down from one minute to the next. You could live a carefully measured life, always wash your hands after peeing, exercise and diet and never smoke or drink, but no one was immune to the car that runs a red light, the germ of a neoplasm that sets the lethal cancer in motion, the dopamine cells that decide, for whatever reason, to stop working. The infarction had been the warning bell that told him a medical degree was not a hedge against disease, and much of what motivated his intense need to solve puzzles was the desire to know everything about every possible ailment so the next time fate tried to dope-slap him, he would be prepared.

-0-

House hadn't told Carolyn he wanted to get up early the next day, so she let him sleep as usual, and when he woke up it was almost nine. He rolled out of bed with a shout and dressed in a frenzy of creative cursing.

Carolyn was unapologetic. "You didn't tell me you needed to get up early."

Knowing he was being unfair only increased House's fury. "I've got a miserable day ahead of me, and I needed to be on time for once. No, no, I'll get coffee when I get there."

"Will you be here for dinner tonight?"

"_No_. I don't know. Aw, Christ, the traffic is gonna be brutal; it'll make me even later." He flung himself out the door, slamming it behind him.

The differential diagnosis only made things worse.

"Hallervorden Spatz," suggested Cameron.

"He's too old."

"Benign essential tumor?" guessed Chase.

"He's too young," said House. "Although I wouldn't rule out a garden-variety tumor."

"Progressive supernuclear palsy," said Foreman.

"No eye involvement. And you said he was responding to L-dopa."

Foreman nodded as if privately confirming something.

"Striato-Nigral Degeneration," ventured Cameron. "Shy Drager Syndrome."

"Now you're just taking stabs in the dark," complained House. "Come on, people, think outside the box."

"Maybe it's vascular parkinsonism," said Foreman.

"Now you're talking," said House, and he wrote that down on the whiteboard.

"Could be environmental," offered Chase. "Manganese, carbon monoxide, carbon disulfide, and cyanide are all implicated in secondary parkinsonism."

"Which is why you're going to check his apartment," House said.

"You want him to look for a manganese mine in Wilson's basement?" asked Cameron.

"I liked you better when you were humorless," House told her. "Yes, if there's a mine down there I want to know it; but he can also look for a malfunctioning furnace and pesticide use. Okay, what else? What's the single most common cause of secondary parkinsonism?"

"Drugs," said Cameron, "but I don't think Wilson is on antipsychotics or MPTP."

"Look anyway," House told Chase. "The rest of us'll start testing." He added "Wilson disease," "encephalitis," and "meningitis" to the list on the whiteboard.

"Encephalitis? Meningitis? Now who's taking stabs in the dark?" asked Foreman.

"I don't want to overlook anything," House said virtuously.

"You're gonna do an LP when he doesn't have any symptoms?"

"It won't kill him. Unless I do it."

"What about a PET scan?"

"Let's hold off on that for now."

Foreman nodded significantly, and left the room.

Alone in his office, House called the farmhouse.

"Don't hang up," he said, when Carolyn answered. "I'm a jerk, but I'm a repentent jerk."

"You were pretty upset this morning," she said evenly.

"This case is chewing my ass pretty bad. " He paused. "In fact, it would be better if I didn't inflict myself on you tonight."

Silence while Carolyn processed this and considered a psychologically sound response.

"All right," she said finally. "When will I see you again?"

"Tomorrow? Dinner?"

"Tomorrow is fine." But she sounded disappointed. "Should we meet somewhere?"

"Come to my office. That way you can drag me away from here instead of sitting at the bar at Micawbers for an hour."

She laughed a little. "Okay. I'll come by around 6. See you then. Miss you."

He hesitated only a moment this time. "I miss you, too." But she had already hung up.

-0-

By late afternoon Chase had returned empty-handed from his search of Wilson's apartment, and some of the test results were in. "Toxins," encephalitis," "meningitis," "tumors," and "vascular" had been crossed off the whiteboard list. They were waiting for a 24-hour urinary copper excretion test for Wilson disease, but the physical exam had already failed to turn up the golden or greenish-brown tinting, called Kayser-Fleischer rings, that are usually found around the corneas of the eyes of Wilson patients.

Foreman came in to pick up his things before going home. He stood looking at the whiteboard over House's shoulder.

"You're running out of zebras," he observed.

His boss threw him a hostile look. Foreman sighed.

"House. Everything on that board put together accounts for less than ten percent of Parkinson cases. You might have to accept defeat on this one."

He waited for a response; receiving none, Foreman left.

-0-

The first real heat wave of the summer had struck while they were in the air-conditioned environment of the hospital. Because he hadn't been there much for three weeks, House hadn't arranged to have his air conditioner installed, and his apartment was sweltering. It was also bare of sustenance—there was nothing in the refrigerator except a lonely beer and a dried-up piece of cheddar cheese, nothing in the cupboards except a box of stale crackers and a tin of sardines he didn't remember buying and that probably were there when he moved in. Lacking the energy to go shopping, House ordered a pizza. In spite of the heat, it was almost cool when it arrived. He ate standing up in front of the sink, washing it down with beer and chasing the beer with whiskey.

At the farmhouse, Carolyn would be chopping vegetables and dancing a little to the music on her iPod, which she had rigged to play through a boombox on top of the refrigerator. Angie would be setting the table and talking a mile a minute. If Nate were there he'd be getting in Carolyn's way trying to be helpful. Somehow, a finished meal would emerge from the chaos, a meal that made limp pizza all the more unappealing by contrast.

The evening dragged on. House tried to play the piano, lost interest, picked up a guitar, put it down. He assembled a collection of medical journals and flagged articles on movement disorders, but when he tried to read one, he found himself scanning the same paragraph over and over without comprehending it. At 11 o'clock he gave up and went to bed.

Bed was even worse. He'd opened the windows, but they admitted no breeze; just the sounds of the neighborhood, including mufflerless cars and an argument next door. His mattress was harder than he remembered, his pillows lumpier. He spread his arms and legs, taking up as much space as he could. The old Police song began running through his mind: "Bed's too big without you/Cold wind blows right through that open door; I can't sleep with the memories, dreaming dreams of what used to be…"

At the farmhouse, in the country, with the shade from the trees, it would be at least ten degrees cooler. Carolyn would have opened all of her windows, too, and with the breeze would come a rural nocturne: an owl at the barn, the occasional raccoon looking for an unguarded trash can, the frogs from a nearby pond. He'd be confined to half the bed, but the other half would be occupied by someone he loved, who loved him.

Had all that really happened? His memories of the past month were already taking on the gauzy quality of dreams. And the critical voice and the analytical voice were moving in to deconstruct what was left.

You didn't really think that could last, said the critical one, sourly. This isn't about Wilson, added the other. If nothing changes, nothing changes; and you won't change, not for anyone. She'll move on, find someone else. You belong to us.

House pulled the pillow over his head and willed himself to sleep. In his dreams he stood beside Carolyn at the barn, listening to her lecture on a horsey topic that was way over his head, but he didn't mind: he was watching her strong, clever fingers as she buckled the bridle and lengthened a stirrup leather. She smiled at him and said, apropos of nothing, "It was real, you know."

"I know," he answered, and felt such an overwhelming sadness that he almost wept.

-0-

The next day brought the final test results. Wilson disease was crossed off the list.

In a crisis, believers pray. Atheists make deals with the universe, whether they know it or not. Consciously, House told himself he was the same as he had ever been, without the time or temperment to sustain a healthy relationship with a woman. Subconsciously, he was bargaining with disease: I will give up happiness if you let go of my friend.

So when Carolyn stopped by to pick him up for dinner, he wasted no time in getting to the point.

"I think we should cool it for awhile," he said, staring at her feet. As an exit line it had the virtue of brevity, but as an explanation it seemed insufficient. He added, testily, "This business of 'It is what it is—'"

"Stop."

He looked up. Carolyn was holding up her hands in a gesture that was half command, half surrender.

"I get the idea," she said quietly. "You don't have to move in for the kill."

She turned and left without a backward glance. House stood for a moment, staring at a point on the ceiling. Then he went to his stash and took out two pills and swallowed them; shook out a third, broke it in half, and took one of those, too. He logged onto his computer and began searching medical databases. He had all night, now.


	9. Acceptance

The days that followed had the nightmarish feel of being swept under by a wave and dragged along the ocean floor. In one part of his brain, House knew he was being irrational; in the other, he heard only the voice of compulsion—Have you tried this? Looked into that? What does Charlie Evans think?—and was helpless to resist it. He called in favors and prevailed upon neurologists who specialized in Parkinson's to listen to minute details of Wilson's case. Most of them pronounced Foreman's reasoning sound, and those who were willing to entertain other possibilities had nothing to offer that the team hadn't already investigated. Yet he persisted, placing call after call, scouring the literature for clues.

His mood deteriorated so rapidly that his team began to talk seriously among themselves about the possibility of a breakdown. He had no patience with opposing viewpoints, no self-control when it came to the pills, no desire to eat or sleep any more than absolutely necessary. A bottle of Scotch appeared in his desk drawer; when that was gone, he got another one. He spent most nights in his office. When sleeplessness overtook him at the hospital he could prowl the corridors and feel connected to something; at home he was adrift, with nothing to steer by and no one to hear him if he went under.

-0-

One evening Wilson persuaded him to leave the hospital for a hamburger that hadn't been sitting in a cafeteria steam tray all day. Passing the research wing, they noticed a small crowd gathering. A group of picketers had posted themselves all along the sidewalk outside the entrance, holding signs that read "Stem Cell Research Murder" and "Don't Take a Life to Save a Life."

House stopped abruptly and took in the scene. "What's going on here?"

"The hospital won a grant to do basic stem cell research," said Wilson "It's been in the papers for two weeks now. The OpEd pages have been rocking with it. The Right to Life group in Princeton has been threatening to picket. I guess this is it." He made as if to move on.

House stood where he had stopped. The crowd around the protesters was almost evenly divided between hospital personnel whom he recognized as "pro-choice" and those he knew to be "right to lifers." Whatever their politics, he thought, they all believed they knew how other people should manage their lives. He thought of Wilson, contemplating a foreshortened career and steadily declining abilities. He thought bitterly of the thousands and thousands of abandoned embryos in deep freeze at fertility clinics around the country, each potentially carrying the secret to a cure. And he cursed the bloody-mindedness of those who would ignore the desperate needs of the life in front of them in favor of a life that hadn't even begun.

The picketers had propped their signs against a railing so they could still be read by passing motorists and gathered around a priest to pray. "Hail Mary, full of grace…"

House began to sing, softly at first, "Every sperm is sacred, Every sperm is great, If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate…"

"…blessed art thou among women…"

Wilson giggled. House raised his voice and projected: "Let the heathen spill theirs, On the dusty ground, God shall make them pay, For each sperm that can't be found."

"…the fruit of thy womb…"

"Every sperm is wanted, Every sperm is good, Every sperm is needed, In your neighborhood!"

The pro-choice section of the crowd began to laugh. The right-to-lifers glared. House took another breath.

"Hindu, Taoist, Mormon, Spill theirs just anywhere, But God loves those who treat their, Semen with more care…"

"Holy Mary, Mother of God…" But the song was penetrating the prayer circle, cutting into its fervor. One woman in particular was growing agitated; the priest said something to her sotto voce, but she continued to stare daggers at House.

House stared right back at her and belted out the next refrain: "Every sperm is useful, Every sperm is fine, God needs everybody's, Mine, and mine, and mine…"

The woman rose, still chanting along with the prayer group only with more volume, and headed straight for House.

"Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death…"

"Let the pagans spill theirs, O'er mountain, hill and plain, God shall strike them down for Each sperm that's spilt in vain."

House and the woman were now eyeball to eyeball, reciting at the tops of their voices. The crowd was cheering them on. Wilson grabbed House's arm and said "Okay, you've made your point, let's go." House shook him off.

"Glory be to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit—"

"Every sperm is sacred, Every sperm is great—"

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be—"

"IF A SPERM IS WASTED, GOD GETS QUITE IRATE—"

"WORLD WITHOUT END, AMEN!"

"Keeping talking to your invisible friend," House advised her. "You'll want to be on good terms with him when I can't figure out how to treat your half-witted kids because cretins like you won't let us do research!"

"Research that murders children!"

"Research that saves lives!"

The crowd was growing larger and more vocal on both sides: "House, shut up!" "Let him talk—he's right!" Wilson was pulling at his arm: "House, let it go, come on!"

But his mind had gone bright red with rage and resistent to reason; all he could hear was the voice that had gotten him into trouble so many times before, urging him on, protesting, "Wait, let me say this, just one more thing—"

He turned on Wilson savagely--"Leave me alone, dammit!"—and confronted his opponent. "You think this is about saving children? Lady, let me clue you in; when you and your buffoon of a president stop stem cell research, you condemn millions of people—people who are alive right now, walking, talking people—to pain and misery and death. That's on your head, dollface."

The woman closed her eyes and began the prayer cycle all over again. The priest stood in the background as if watching a prize fight.

A hospital security guard pushed his way through the crowd and confronted House. "Doctor, will you come with me, please?"

"We were just leaving," Wilson assured him.

"Maybe so, Doctor, but I've got a report of a disturbance, and—"

Wilson drew himself up and looked, lasarlike, into the guard's eyes. "I said we're leaving," he repeated. The guard backed down, muttering that they'd better get going, then, before things got ugly.

A cheer went up when House left the arena, but he was too numb to enjoy it. The numbness lasted until Wilson escorted him back to his office. House sat, feeling something hot and painful swell and rise in his chest. He tried to take deep breaths, and failed. He turned to Wilson, expecting tight-lipped anger, and saw something much worse than that: compassion. The swelling grew.

He turned to anger, always a reliable dodge. "Morons," he fumed. "Idiots. They do everything they can to get in our way, then they come in expecting miracles when their god won't cure their cancer, or their diabetes—"

"House."

"—they worry about zygotes and ignore the kids already here—"

"House. You're over the top. What's going on with you? Where's Carolyn these days?"

A stab of pain that House located in his thigh made him grimace and clutch at his leg. He needed a pill—maybe two. "We're taking a break," he said. "Her idea. She wants…to spend more time with Angie."

Wilson said nothing, but he didn't look convinced.

-0-

Later, having got rid of Wilson, House went to swallow a pill. It came right back up again. He frowned and tried again—same thing. It took a full glass of water to get it down, as if his body were rejecting the drug at some fundamental level. Worse, he was having trouble summoning the insouciance that used to let him pretend he was better off with his pills and booze than with people and the aggravation that accompanies them. It had never been true, but now he couldn't even fake it. He tried to absorb himself in a study on a promising new medication for Parkinson's, but work was beginning to lose its power to shut out thought. And loneliness, his constant companion since childhood, was becoming a burden and, frankly, a bore.

-0-

House made a mental note to avoid Oncology between one and four on Friday afternoon, when Carolyn brought Angie for her chemo. He usually avoided Oncology anyway, but he was resolute about staying away from that wing during that particular time. He barricaded himself in his office until almost three. Then he turned left instead of right coming out of the men's room and found himself on the way to the fifth floor.

He saw Carolyn almost as soon as he got off the elevator. She was leaning against the wall just outside one of the chemo rooms—presumably Angie's—talking to Wilson, her back to House, who positioned himself behind a column and watched.

She was wearing her "comfortable jeans," faded and a little baggy in the seat, and a denim jacket. From the color of the hem showing under the jacket's waistband he could tell she was also wearing her "PMS: Pissed-Off Mare Syndrome" t-shirt. Black ankle boots completed the outfit; he could picture the spot in her shoe rack where she stored them. He noted once again how well-proportioned she was for a short woman, how neatly her form fit its function. She looked slightly mussed, kicked-back, and relaxed, and the need to go to her became so overwhelming that he turned away for a moment, leaning against the column and closing his eyes against the ache in his chest.

He looked again. Carolyn and Wilson were deep in conversation, talking intimately, her fingertips on his forearm. Would they end up together? A dispassionate observer would think it a good match on both sides: Wilson was a much more stable companion than House could ever hope to be, and Carolyn would provide the companionship Wilson craved and the care he would need. And House could go on being House, with all the time in the world to brood and obsess, with no danger of splashing anyone else with the vitriol of his uglier moods. It would be best all around. Down the hall, Carolyn embraced Wilson, who returned the hug with all his might. The ache grew more intense. House slipped away

-0-

He was sitting at his desk waiting for a pill to blur the edges when Wilson entered the conference room and strode to the whiteboard. He grabbed the eraser and wiped it clean in a dozen quick strokes. Then he gathered the files spread over the table and began feeding the contents into the shredder.

House gimped over and stood in the doorway watching two weeks of painfully accumulated data turn into confetti. "What're you doing?" he sputtered.

"Something I should've done from the start," Wilson said grimly. "I'm taking you off the case. You're fired, House. Finished, finito, kaput." He fed the last batch of notes into the shredder and tossed the empty folder into the wastebasket.

"I saw you lurking upstairs," Wilson continued. "You looked positively lovesick. Carolyn says _you_ broke it off. For god's sake, why? You were happy with her!"

House shrugged. "Obviously I'm not geared for relationships."

"Bullshit," said Wilson. "I'm not letting you get away with that lame excuse again. Cuddy says you've been researching parkinsonian disorders 24-seven. You've been holed up like a monk, and I think you have some monkish idea that if you make the right sacrifice, you'll find favor with the cosmos. Admit it: you dropped Carolyn so you could solve the goddamned puzzle, didn't you?"

House glared at him as he fished out a pill, but said nothing.

"House," Wilson said slowly. "Listen to me. I have Parkinson's. I have it. I've accepted it. You have to accept it, too. You're not going to change anything by turning yourself into a martyr for my sake. You won't be able to help me the way I need to be helped if you OD, either."

He walked around the table to where House had to look at him. "You know what helps me most? Seeing you with Carolyn. The two of you, arguing and joking and getting along. It gives me hope." He smiled. "If a miserable old son of a bitch like you can find love and happiness this late in the game, there's gotta be someone out there for me, right?"

House regarded him somberly, the pill still in his hand.

"So let me explain something to you, since you seem to have it backward: When you love someone, you try to be with them. You draw them to you, you don't push them away. And you don't give them up out of some half-baked notion of balancing someone else's karma. Now, before it's too late, make it right with Carolyn."

"I've already had my second chance with her." House said miserably.

"Third time's the charm." Wilson reached over, picked up the telephone receiver, and held it out to him. "Call her. Tell her Dr. Wilson needs an evening at a Chinese place with good friends."

"I can't do that over the phone," House mumbled. "She'd probably hang up as soon as she heard my voice."

"Then go see her," said Wilson. "But House—for chrissake, take a shower first."

-0-

Showered and clad in fresh jeans and t-shirt, House walked to the shed, rolled out his bike, and got on. For some reason, he thought of _The Charge of the Light Brigade_:

Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward/All in the Valley of Death Rode the six hundred/Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns! he said...

In his mind's eye he could see Carolyn in her graduation gown, the coldness in her expression as she flipped him off after he broke off their affair in college. The gesture probably wouldn't be repeated today, but that was a less fearsome prospect than the coldness anyway.

The trip to the farmhouse was shorter than he remembered. Too soon, he was pulling up the driveway to the barn. Carolyn was in the ring lunging Jack, who cantered lightly in a circle, barely looking at him as he pulled up to the fence, killed the motor, and dismounted.

Carolyn called out to the horse, who dropped back to a walk and headed toward her. She patted his neck and led him to where House stood, trying to lower his blood pressure through sheer willpower.

"I was in the neighborhood," he told Jack, "and I thought I'd drop by. He's looking good."

Carolyn smiled faintly. "We're getting there."

"That's great. Really good. And Cherokee?"

"He's fine, too. Getting fat."

"How about Angie?"

"She's doing well. Treatment number four today; she's almost finished."

"Good for Angie."

Having determined that House was not carrying treats, Jack tried to wedge his head under the fence to reach the grass on the other side. Carolyn pulled his head back up.

"He'll wear off his mane if he does that… I talked to Dr. Wilson today." She turned candid blue eyes to his face. "He told me what's been going on with him."

"He has Parkinson's," said House, forcing the words past the tightness in his throat.

"He says you've been working day and night, driving yourself and everyone else crazy, trying to find a way to help him." She smiled. "You're a good friend."

"He's doing fine without me," said House. "Foreman's found the right combination of meds, and he's almost symptom free." He cleared his throat. "He wondered if we could get together. For dinner. Tomorrow night."

"We?"

Her look was gentle but unyielding; equivocation was not an option. He felt the old panic tightening his stomach, rising through his chest. He looked down again and took a deep breath.

"I love you," he said, to Jack's shoulder. With an effort, he looked up and held her gaze. "I love you. And I would be very, very happy if you could find a way to let me back into your life."

There was a thundering sound in his ears; his vision blurred. He dropped his eyes again, waiting for the blow:

Greg, that's sweet, but I've met someone else.

Greg, I appreciate your candor, but I think it's time we faced facts.

Greg, get out of here before I call the police.

Hearing nothing, he looked up. Carolyn was still gazing at him, her cheeks wet with tears. "I love you, too," she said, and reaching up, she drew his face toward hers. They kissed over the fence, as Jack finally got his head under the fence and began tearing at the grass at their feet. Oblivious to the human drama taking place over his head, he was just glad of the distraction that left him free, for the moment, to go after something he wanted very much.

THE END


End file.
